Ms. Fitzpatrick, a fisheries compliance officer who is originally from Canada, has lived in Scotland for more than 20 years, Mr. Briggs said. Under Scottish law, she is prohibited from speaking publicly while her case is under consideration.

But she laid out her case in stark terms at the preliminary hearing in 2017 at the Aberdeen Tribunal Hearing Center to establish whether her claim can proceed. She said she had been mocked for a miscarriage and had endured sexist language, in addition to hearing colleagues use racist slurs, news outlets reported at the time.

Ms. Fitzpatrick told the court that she had received Valentine’s Day cards from someone at work in which she was called a troll and told, “We miss you not.” Marine Scotland didn’t want “a woman, especially a foreign woman,” working there, she said she was told; and she said she had witnessed threatening behavior toward female staff members, who were sometimes referred to as prostitutes, according to the BBC.

Because of the statute of limitations, neither the picture nor other evidence from years past will be submitted to the tribunal in June, her lawyer said. When the judge in the case, Nick Hosie, gave the claims against Marine Scotland the green light, Mr. Briggs said, he “significantly narrowed” their scope to three months in 2017 because of a legal time limit on her formal complaint.

Judge Hosie said Ms. Fitzpatrick could try to make a case for harassment as laid out in Section 26 of the United Kingdom’s Equality Act, the lawyer said, adding that the ruling did not invalidate the “hostile and degrading environment” she endured.

Emails showed that Ms. Fitzpatrick had alerted a manager about the tape episode in the photo, according to the BBC. But her complaints were dismissed by the unidentified manager who is quoted in the emails as saying, “I am sure they meant no harm and that was the boys just being boys,” the BBC reported.