One commentator has described it as a “series of loosely bound doctrines and casual labels that different courts assign to proffered evidence of discrimination that they planned to discount or ignore.” Kerri Lynne Stone, Taking in Strays: A Critique of the Stray Comment Doctrine in Employment Discrimination Law, 77 MO. L. Rev. 149, 159 (2012). Prof. Stone’s analysis of the different meanings applied by different courts provides a useful template for evaluating the potential significance of a remark in a given case. Among the various iterations are: “1) the remark(s) were made by one too removed from the decision-making process at issue; (2) the remark(s) were isolated, as opposed to part of a broader pattern of comments tending to evince bias; (3) the remarks were not made with sufficient temporal proximity to the adverse action at issue in the suit; (4) the remark(s) are too ambiguous to be clearly probative of discriminatory bias; or (5) the remark(s) were too contextually attenuated from the adverse action at issue in the suit to be reflective of discriminatory bias.” Id. at 159–160.5
Mason v. Se. Pennsylvania Transp. Auth., No. 14-CV-1372, 2015 WL 5544358, at *5 (E.D. Pa. Sept. 18, 2015)