by Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog
The Supreme Court on Thursday sent the case of an Ohio woman who contends that she was the victim of reverse discrimination back to the lower courts. In a unanimous ruling by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justices agreed that a federal appeals court in Cincinnati was wrong to impose a higher bar for the case brought by Marlean Ames to move forward than if Ames had been a member of a minority group.
Ames had worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services for 15 years, starting as an executive secretary in 2004 and eventually becoming a program administrator. In her 2018 performance evaluation, Ames’s new supervisor, who is gay, indicated that Ames met expectations in 10 categories and exceeded them in an 11th.
The dispute began in 2019, when Ames applied for a new position within the department. Not only did she not get that job, but she was also demoted to a previous position, where her hourly salary was just over half of what she had previously been making.
Ames filed a lawsuit in federal court, alleging that she had been the victim of employment discrimination based on her sexual orientation. The department had hired a lesbian for the position that she had sought, she contended, as well as a gay man to replace her after she was demoted.
The United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit threw out Ames’s sexual orientation claim. Because Ames is straight, the court of appeals explained, her claim could not go forward unless she could show “background circumstances” to support her allegations of reverse discrimination – for example, evidence that a member of a minority group made the allegedly discriminatory decision or showing a pattern of discrimination against members of a majority group. But in this case, the court of appeals emphasized, the department officials who actually made the hiring and demotion decisions were straight, and there was no “pattern” of reverse discrimination.
In a nine-page decision on Thursday,
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