The Supreme Court has unanimously ruled in favor of an Ohio woman who says she faced workplace discrimination for being heterosexual. The ruling may result in more lawsuits against employers by members of majority groups.

Marlean Ames sued the Ohio Department of Youth Services after she was not hired for roles that were ultimately filled by gay people. The justices agreed with Ames that members of majority groups should not be required to meet a higher burden of proof than minority groups to establish that discrimination occurred.

Related

Supreme Court refuses to hear case of student banned for wearing “only two genders” t-shirt
A big majority of justices declined to hear the case, with Thomas and Alito dissenting.

The ruling thus struck down a standard that about half the federal courts in the country reportedly utilize to determine if someone from a majority group was a victim of discrimination.

Never Miss a Beat

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, authored the opinion. “The Sixth Circuit’s ‘background circumstances’ rule,” she wrote, “requires plaintiffs who are members of a majority group to bear an additional burden at step one. But the text of Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs.”

“The provision focuses on individuals rather than groups, barring discrimination against ‘any individual’ because of protected characteristics. Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone.”

But the defense, represented by Ohio Solicitor General T. Elliot Gaiser, was less focused on the framework and more focused on whether any actual anti-straight discrimination took place. Gaiser argued that regardless of the burden of proof, Ames would not meet it and could not prove any anti-straight bias took against her.

Ames will now reportedly return to the lower court and seek to prove discrimination with this lower standard.

Ames worked for 20 years at the Ohio Department of Youth Services, a state agency that oversees the confinement and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. In 2014, she was promoted to serve as an administrator.

In 2017, a gay woman named Ginine Trim became Ames’ new supervisor. In December 2018, Trim gave Ames a performance evaluation that said Ames mostly “met” all of her job expectations and had an “opportunity to improve” in three areas. Then, in April 2019, Ames applied and interviewed to become the Department’s Bureau Chief of Quality — she didn’t get the job.

One month later, the agency’s Human Resources department called Ames into a meeting where they terminated her role as PREA administrator and demoted her to her former role, reducing her pay from $47.22 an hour to $28.40 an hour, court documents allege.

The agency’s director and assistant director who oversaw Ames’ demotion are both heterosexual, and at different times, they provided different reasons for her demotion. Once, they mentioned that her position was an “at-will” role whose work could be terminated at any time; another time, they said that they wanted a worker who would regularly exceed (rather than just “meet”) the job’s expectations.

The following December, the department hired Alexander Stojsavljevic, a 25-year-old gay man, for the PREA administrator position and chose Yolanda Frierson, a gay woman, as its Bureau Chief of Quality. Ames filed a discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and then filed a lawsuit. Both a district court and the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against Ames.

Ames claimed that she had faced discrimination based on her sexual orientation, something banned by Title VII after the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County decision. The decision ruled that workplace discrimination against sexual orientation and gender identity are forms of sex-based discrimination.

However, in its summary judgment, the district court said Ames had failed to prove that she was a member of a “protected class” of people who have historically been discriminated against for their personal characteristics. The court also said Ames failed to substantiate “background circumstances” proving that LGBTQ+ people had made the decisions against her or that they had discriminated against other heterosexual workers before in the past.

Ames herself acknowledged that the agency’s heterosexual director and assistant director made the decision to hire the gay man who took the Bureau Chief of Quality position.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.