The US supreme court made it easier on Thursday for people from majority backgrounds such as white or straight individuals to pursue claims alleging workplace “reverse discrimination”, reviving the case of an Ohio woman who claimed that she did not get a promotion at a state agency because she is heterosexual.
The justices, in a 9-0 ruling, threw out a lower court‘s decision rejecting a civil rights lawsuit by the plaintiff, Marlean Ames, against her employer, Ohio’s department of youth services.
Ames argued that she was denied a promotion within the Ohio department of youth services because she is heterosexual. A lesbian was hired for the job instead, and Ames was eventually demoted to a lower position with lower pay, with a gay man taking her previous role.
Misleading title. The issue was that, in discrimination cases, lower courts started making majority groups (white people, straight people) provide extra evidence of discrimination than is usually required in order to win an employment discrimination case. All this decision did is clarified that, for discrimination cases, majority groups don’t need to provide extra evidence of discrimination—there isn’t a higher bar for majority groups. The ‘burden’ of evidence of discrimination is the same regardless of which group is claiming discrimination. The Supreme Court, in making this decision, didn’t decide any facts, they just instructed the lower court to look at the case again with this clarification in mind. The lower courts might still find she wasn’t subject to discrimination.