Lawsuits for “reverse discrimination” will face an easier path after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously sided on Thursday with a woman who argued that she was passed over for a promotion and later demoted because she is straight.
The court’s ruling is a departure from previous court decisions that have set a higher bar in cases where people who are part of a majority group, such as those who are white and straight, filed lawsuits alleging discrimination under federal civil rights law.
But the Supreme Court said in its ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race and sexual orientation, among other characteristics, “draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs. Rather, the provision makes it unlawful ‘to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.’”
“By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’—without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group—Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for the court.
The case was brought by Marlean Ames against the Ohio Department of Youth Services, where she started working in 2004. In 2019, she applied for a promotion, but was turned down and a colleague with less seniority—who was a lesbian woman—received the promotion instead. Ames was later demoted and her previous role was given to another colleague who had less seniority, a gay man.
She sued under Title VII, alleging in her lawsuit that she was denied the promotion and then demoted due to her sexual orientation.
Her supervisors, however, said Ames was passed over for the promotion because she didn’t have the vision and leadership skills needed for the role and demoted because they had concerns about her leadership skills.
Lower courts had previously ruled against Ames, saying her lawsuit failed to demonstrate “background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.” But the Supreme Court ruled that requirement was “not consistent with Title VII’s text or our case law construing the statute.”