Supreme Court Gives Win To Majority Group Claims Of Discrimination

“Reverse discrimination” just got a lot easier to prove.

The Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling Thursday that reduces the burden of proof that people who are part of a “majority group” must provide when they sue for discrimination and remanded the decision back to the Sixth Circuit.

“This Court’s precedents reinforce that understanding of the statute, and make clear that the standard for proving disparate treatment under Title VII does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group,” the opinion states.

Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson wrote the opinion for the court on Thursday.

At question was the standard of proof that members of majority groups must bring when claiming discrimination, and whether they should be held to a higher standard than members of “protected classes.” The ruling stems from a lawsuit that started in 2020, when Marlean Ames sued her former employer, the Ohio Department of Youth Services, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act for discrimination based on her sexual orientation. Ames, who is straight, alleged that she had been discriminated against by gay superiors.

Ames started working at the agency that oversees juvenile corrections in 2004 and, after a decade, she had moved up the ranks from the role of an executive secretary to program administrator. When a bureau chief position opened up at the department in 2019, she applied.

Just a year earlier, Ames underwent a performance evaluation by her boss, a gay woman. Her boss found Ames mostly met expectations but rarely exceeded them. According to court records, there were concerns that Ames lacked the “vision” and leadership skills required for the bureau chief role.

Ames was passed over for the promotion and then demoted to another role that paid less than she had previously been earning. According to Ames, this wasn’t due to her performance but because she was straight. The agency said it passed on Ames because of concerns over her leadership abilities and that, historically, she had been “abrasive and not collaborative” though her work ethic was considered strong.

When she sued for discrimination based on her sexual orientation, Ames noted that the person who evaluated her was gay and so was the person who got the promotion she had applied for. The individual who actually made the hiring decision for that position, however, was straight.

Initially, a federal district court in Ohio tossed Ames’ lawsuit, finding she had failed to prove there was a pattern of discrimination by gay people at the department against straight people.

As a heterosexual, the courts consider Ames part of a majority group, as opposed to people who are part of a protected class. Protected classes cover a person’s sex, sexual orientation, age, ancestry, color, religion and more. But for a person in the majority to successfully sue for discrimination, some courts — not all — require evidence of “background circumstances” to support their claim.

Background circumstances must show that the person or people outside the majority are engaged in an unusual pattern of discrimination against the majority. Ames never proved that pattern, according to the district court, and when she appealed, judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit didn’t think she had proved it either. (Currently, only a handful of circuits require background circumstances, including the 6th Circuit; others, like the uber-conservative 5th Circuit, don’t apply the standard at all. And notably, the background circumstances rule has also been rejected by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission itself, the very body that oversees enforcement of laws that make discrimination illegal.)

When Ames’ lawyers came to the Supreme Court in February and asked the high court to reverse the 6th Circuit’s decisions, the justices seemed to signal how they would rule, as they asked questions about the fairness of requiring more burden of proof for one group of people versus another when they are suing for discrimination.

“For most plaintiffs,” Justice Jackson wrote, the initial steps they must take to provide a burden of proof “is not onerous.”

“A plaintiff may satisfy it simply by presenting evidence ‘that she applied for an available position for which she was qualified, but was rejected under circumstances which give rise to an inference of unlawful discrimination.’ But, under Sixth Circuit precedent, plaintiffs who are members of a majority group bear an additional burden at step one: They must also establish ‘background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.’”

The Sixth Circuit’s “background circumstances” rule, the justice added, can’t “be squared with the text of Title VII or our longstanding precedents.”

“And nothing Ohio has said, in its brief or at oral argument, persuades us otherwise,” she wrote.

In the concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said the “background circumstances rule also highlights how judge-made doctrines can be difficult for courts to apply.”

“Because courts lack an underlying legal authority on which to ground their analysis, there is no principled way to resolve doctrinal ambiguities. The ‘background circumstances’ rule suffers from this flaw. A number of courts have described the rule as ‘vague and ill-defined,’” he wrote, citing a series of rulings in reverse discrimination from years past. “Most notably, the ‘background circumstances’ rule requires courts to perform the difficult — if not impossible — task of deciding whether a particular plaintiff qualifies as a member of the so-called ‘majority.’”

Thomas continued: “How a court defines the boundaries of a population can affect whether a particular person falls into a majority or minority group. Women, for example, make up the majority in the United States as a whole, but not in some States and counties.”

When trying to define the majority in terms of race, it becomes “even more difficult,” Thomas wrote, noting the growth of “multicultural families” throughout the U.S.

Attempts to “divide us all up into a handful of groups have only become more incoherent with time,” Thomas wrote, quoting directly from Justice Neil Gorsuch in the 2023 decision for Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College. In that ruling, the Supreme Court found affirmative action processes for college admissions violated the Equal Protection clause.

“Thankfully, today’s decision obviates the need for courts to engage in the ‘sordid business’ of ‘divvying us up by race’ or any other protected trait,” Thomas wrote.

With the background circumstances doctrine unwound, the Supreme Court may have granted the Trump administration a huge gift: Since January, the administration has been dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion programs at a near constant clip. With the door now flung open, reverse discrimination cases are expected to flourish.