In a unanimous opinion issued today (authored by Justice Jackson), Ames v. Ohio Dept. of Youth Services, No. 23-1039, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a lower court opinion, holding that majority-group plaintiffs are not required to meet a heightened evidentiary standard of showing “background circumstances” to establish a prima facie case of discrimination at the first step of the McDonnell Douglas analytical framework used to evaluate discrimination claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In sum, the petitioner – a heterosexual woman – contends that the respondent declined to hire her for a management position for which it ultimately hired a lesbian woman, removed her from her role, demoted her, and then hired a gay man to fill the role from which she was removed. Plaintiff sued, alleging that she was denied the management promotion and demoted because of her sexual orientation, in violation of Title VII. The district court granted summary judgment to the employer, concluding that petitioner failed to make a prima facie showing “because she had not presented evidence of ‘background circumstances’ suggesting that the agency was the rare employer who discriminates against members of a majority group” without which evidence “plaintiffs who are members of majority groups—including heterosexual plaintiffs, like Ames—could not discharge their evidentiary burden at the first step of the McDonnell Douglas inquiry.” The Sixth Circuit affirmed.
The Supreme Court disagrees. From the decision:
Title VII prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Under our Title VII precedents, a plaintiff may make out a prima facie case of disparate treatment by showing 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. Texas Dept. of Community Affairs v. Burdine, 450 U.S. 248, 253, 101 S.Ct. 1089, 67 L.Ed.2d 207 (1981).
The question in this case is whether, to satisfy that prima facie burden, a plaintiff who is a member of a majority group must also show background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority. We hold that this additional “background circumstances” requirement is not consistent with Title VII’s text or our case law construing the statute.
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As a textual matter, Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision 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.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e–2(a)(1) (emphasis added). The “law’s focus on individuals rather than groups [is] anything but academic.” Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644, 659, 140 S.Ct. 1731, 207 L.Ed.2d 218 (2020). 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.
Our precedents reinforce that understanding of the statute. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424, 91 S.Ct. 849, 28 L.Ed.2d 158 (1971), for instance, we said that [d]iscriminatory preference for any group, minority or majority, is precisely and only what Congress has proscribed in Title VII. We made the same point even more explicitly in McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co., 427 U.S. 273, 96 S.Ct. 2574, 49 L.Ed.2d 493 (1976), a few years later. The employer in that case had argued that certain forms of discrimination against White employees fell outside the reach of Title VII. But we rejected that argument, holding that Title VII prohibit[ed] racial discrimination against the white petitioners in th[at] case upon the same standards as would be applicable were they Negroes. …
Our case law thus makes 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. Accord, Bostock, 590 U.S. at 659, 140 S.Ct. 1731 (“This statute works to protect individuals of both sexes from discrimination, and does so equally”). The “background circumstances” rule flouts that basic principle.
The “background circumstances” rule also ignores our instruction to avoid inflexible applications of McDonnell Douglas’s first prong. This Court has repeatedly explained that the precise requirements of a prima facie case can vary depending on the context and were never intended to be rigid, mechanized, or ritualistic. In McDonnell Douglas itself, we observed that the facts necessarily will vary in Title VII cases, and that the prima facie proof required can therefore differ from case to case.
The “background circumstances” rule disregards this admonition by uniformly subjecting all majority-group plaintiffs to the same, highly specific evidentiary standard in every case. As the Sixth Circuit observed, the rule effectively requires majority-group plaintiffs (and only majority-group plaintiffs) to produce certain types of evidence—such as statistical proof or information about the relevant decisionmaker’s protected traits—that would not otherwise be required to make out a prima facie case.
This Court has long rejected such “inflexible formulation[s]” of the prima facie standard in disparate-treatment cases. Teamsters v. United States, 431 U.S. 324, 358, 97 S.Ct. 1843, 52 L.Ed.2d 396 (1977). We do so again today.
[Citations and quotation marks omitted.]
The court explained that
Accordingly, the Court vacated the judgment below, and remanded for application of the proper prima facie standard.
Justice Thomas filed a concurring opinion, in which Gorsuch joined.