Browning

We address the issue of whether a district court’s refusal to give a permissive jury instruction regarding pretext in an employment discrimination case is reversible error. We reaffirm that so long as the jury instructions set forth the essential elements that the plaintiff must prove, a district court does not abuse its discretion in declining to give an instruction explicitly addressing pretext.

I.

Henrietta Browning has worked at an Internal Revenue Service call center in Portland, Oregon, since 1989. In 1998, she was temporarily promoted to the position of team leader, assuming responsibility for the supervision of a group of employees. The following year, incoming operations manager Gloria Candanoza made Browning’s promotion permanent. After Browning transferred from the night shift to the day shift in 2002, she was supervised by department manager Art Ayotte.

As a team leader, Browning was required to monitor a certain number of the calls performed by each employee on her team each month, write a detailed critique of the call and enter the review into a computerized database. Team leaders were also each assigned responsibility for an “application” (a distinct area of tax…