A U.S. Supreme Court decision on June 5 potentially opened the door to a flood of discrimination claims by rejecting a higher evidentiary standard for majority group members trying to show unlawful discrimination. The ruling underscores the importance of ensuring your inclusive workplace culture emphasizes respect for all employees, or else you risk being sued by many people in the majority like the plaintiff in this case, a heterosexual employee.
As SHRM President and Chief Executive Officer Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM-SCP, has noted, with diversity established as inevitable, creating a culture of inclusion becomes the greater — and more crucial — challenge.
In the case before the Supreme Court, the plaintiff, Marlean Ames, is a straight woman who said she was denied a promotion and later demoted in favor of less-qualified colleagues due to discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 over her sex and sexual orientation. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed her claim, ruling that she failed to provide “background circumstances” proving her employer discriminated against her.
But in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected this higher evidentiary standard for members of a majority group. “As a textual matter, Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs,” the court said. Instead, the court clarified, the...
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