The US Supreme Court has voted to make it easier for people from majority groups in workplace disputes to sue their employer for discrimination.
The justices voted unanimously to make it easier for white and heterosexual people, for example, to file “reverse discrimination” cases.
The ruling came about as a result of the case of an Ohio woman who alleged she was discriminated against in her job because she was heterosexual.
Marlean Ames had worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services for 15 years, starting as an executive secretary in 2004 and eventually becoming a programme administrator. In her 2018 performance evaluation, Ames’s new supervisor, who was gay, indicated that Ames met expectations in 10 categories and exceeded them in an 11th.
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The dispute began in 2019, when Ames applied for a new position within the department. Not only did she not get that job, but she was also demoted to a previous position, where her hourly salary was just over half of what she had previously been making.
Ames filed a lawsuit in federal court, alleging that she had been the victim of employment discrimination based on her sexual orientation. The department had hired a lesbian for the position that she had sought, she contended, as well as a gay man to replace her after she was demoted.
In a lawsuit, she argued her employer had a preference for LGBTQ staff members and denied her opportunities because she identifies as straight.
Lower courts ruled that she had failed to provide sufficient evidence of her claim, so Ames appealed to the Supreme Court to challenge the standards in terms of burden of proof.
US court precedent covering some states, including Ohio, had required that members of majority groups showed additional background circumstances to prove their case or evidence showing a pattern of discrimination.
The court has now ruled that the standard of evidence for a discrimination claim should be the same, regardless of a person’s identity. This meant that the federal appeals court in Cincinnati had been wrong to impose a higher bar for the case brought by Ames to move forward than if Ames had been a member of a minority group.
The lower court’s ruling was inconsistent with the text of federal employment discrimination law, which barred discrimination against everyone – without distinguishing between members of a minority group and members of a majority group, the Supreme Court ruling found.
“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 Kentaji Brown Jackson wrote.
The justices said it was up to lower courts that had initially ruled against her to evaluate the case under the clarified evidence standards.
Legal experts say employment discrimination and bias cases can be difficult to demonstrate, regardless of the burden of proof.
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