In a new opinion from the United States Supreme Court, the Justices unanimously ruled that reverse discrimination claims are not subject to a heightened evidentiary burden.
Reverse discrimination commonly refers to a member of a majority group claiming that they were discriminated against because of their membership in the majority group. This is sometimes called “reverse discrimination” because typically it is members of a minority group who claim that they have been discriminated against by the majority.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.[1] When there is no direct evidence of discrimination, one method of proving discrimination is to satisfy the McDonnell Douglas test. Under the McDonnell Douglas framework, an employee has the initial burden of making a prima facie case of discrimination as follows:
In Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, the petitioner, Marlean Ames, a heterosexual woman, claimed that she was denied a promotion and demoted because of her sexual orientation. Ames had worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services since 2004. In 2019, she interviewed for a management position, but the employer hired a lesbian woman for the role instead. Thereafter, Ames was demoted from her program administrator role and was replaced by a gay man. Ames filed suit under Title VII, alleging that she had been discriminated against based on her sexual orientation.
The lower courts held that Ames did not satisfy her initial burden to make a prima facie case of discrimination because she had not shown “background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is the unusual employer who discriminates against the majority,” such as evidence that the decision makers were members of the relevant minority group or statistical evidence showing a pattern of discrimination against the majority.[3] Because Ames did not present evidence of any such background circumstances, the trial court granted summary judgment in the employer’s favor, and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed.
The Supreme Court, however, had the last word, and dismantled the “background circumstances” rule. The Supreme Court held that majority-group plaintiffs (or those claiming “reverse discrimination”) cannot be subject to a heightened evidentiary burden. Citing both the plain language of Title VII and its own previous decisions, the Supreme Court explained that courts cannot impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone.
The result? It will now be easier for majority-group plaintiffs to satisfy their initial burden of proving discrimination in circuits that previously set heightened standards for them. Employers should take claims of discrimination seriously from anyone who makes them – regardless of whether they belong to a majority or minority group.
