In Chambers v. District of Columbia, 35 F.4th 870 (D.C. Cir. 2022), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that under the anti-discrimination provision of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the denial of a transfer may constitute actionable discrimination, notwithstanding the absence of “objectively tangible harm.”
This case is instructive as to the fundamental principles applicable in a Title VII discrimination case.
The court summarized its holding as follows:
The parties agree that Chambers’s claim is covered by the antidiscrimination provision of Title VII, section 703(a)(1), which makes it “an unlawful employment practice… 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.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1). Chambers claims her employer denied her repeated requests for a transfer to a different unit while granting similar 874*874 requests to male employees. Therefore, the question before us, put in terms of the relevant statutory text, is whether an employer that denies an employee’s request for a job transfer because of her sex (or another protected characteristic) “discriminate[s] against” the employee with respect to the “terms, conditions, or privileges of employment.” As we show below, the answer provided by the straightforward meaning of the statute is an emphatic yes, and that answer is fully consistent with Supreme Court precedent.
It continued by parsing the statute and explaining that a transfer clearly comes within the phrase “terms, conditions, or privileges of employment” and that the term “discrimination” clearly refers to “differential treatment”.
Furthermore, it held that “[o]nce it has been established that an employer has discriminated against an employee with respect to that employee’s ‘terms, conditions, or privileges of employment’ because of a protected characteristic, the analysis is complete,” that Title VII’s plain text “requires no more,” and that “[a]ny additional requirement, such as [a requirement of] ‘objectively tangible harm, is a judicial gloss that lacks any textual support.”