A Supreme Court ruling on Thursday handed a victory to white Americans and straight people who believe they have been discriminated against in the workplace.
But just how widespread are those complaints?
President Trump and his allies have argued that discrimination against white Americans and straight people is a workplace scourge that often occurs under the cover of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. His administration has gone to great lengths to undo what it calls “illegal D.E.I.,” including ousting diversity officials from federal agencies and removing D.E.I. language from government websites.
Experts in employment law argue that the reality is more complicated, and say that the Supreme Court ruling is unlikely to drastically change the makeup of those filing and winning workplace discrimination cases.
“It will likely continue to be that a majority of discrimination cases are filed by minority-group members,” said Camille Olson, a partner at the management-side law firm Seyfarth Shaw. “But I think there will be an increasing number of cases that are filed by individuals who are either male or heterosexual or not a member of a minority race or religion.”
Federal government data suggest that members of so-called majority groups have historically brought only a small fraction of discrimination cases. Of the roughly 21,000 charges of race-based employment discrimination filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2021, only slightly more than 10 percent — about 2,350 — involved charges of discrimination against white people.
Ms. Olson said that such figures almost certainly understated the number of cases of discrimination against white people in the workplace, partly because the law in many parts of the country created an obstacle to litigating these cases.
The court’s unanimous decision on Thursday swept away that obstacle. The court, in finding in favor of a straight woman whose employer rejected her for two positions in favor of colleagues who were gay, invalidated something called the “background circumstances” rule. Under that rule, adopted by several appellate courts, white people and other members of majority groups had to go further than members of minority groups in demonstrating that they were discriminated against before the case could proceed. The court sent the woman’s case back to a lower court.
Now that these rules are no longer in effect, many white, male or straight plaintiffs will have an easier time moving forward. “The court has let everyone know that the cost of filing a ‘reverse discrimination’ claim just went down, so corporations should be on notice that they are now at greater risk of facing those claims,” said Stefan Padfield, executive director of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, which has challenged corporate diversity policies.
But experts cautioned that this doesn’t mean the country is necessarily on the verge of an explosion of these cases. For one thing, the barrier that the Supreme Court struck down was adopted in fewer than half the federal appellate circuits in the country, as the court’s opinion noted.
And the barrier was not one that was embraced elsewhere in government. The ruling reflected the existing consensus that members of different groups should not be held to different standards when judging whether they experienced discrimination, said Jocelyn Samuels, who served in the Justice Department under President Barack Obama and, later, on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Supreme Court’s position “is the position that the E.E.O.C. historically took, the position that the Department of Justice under Joe Biden took,” she added.
At the same time, many experts pointed out that the majority opinion doesn’t address whether corporate diversity policies themselves are legal or illegal.The legal standard for those polices remains unchanged after Thursday’s decision.
“This does not change the lay of the land,” said Chai Feldblum, another former E.E.O.C. commissioner, who was nominated by Barack Obama. “There are things that employers should never do for the purposes of increasing diversity, such as directly discriminating against a white person.” Beyond that, she said, many diversity policies continue to be legal.
As a practical matter, however, many corporations have been revising or altogether dispensing with diversity policies over the past few years. One impetus was the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling on affirmative action in higher education. While not directly discussing employment discrimination, the decision made clear that there was growing skepticism among the justices for policies that do not appear to be race neutral.
“Employer practices have certainly changed in response to recent holdings on discrimination from the court,” said Bennett Nuss, a lawyer affiliated with the Free Enterprise Project, in an email. Mr. Trump’s election further prompted employers to alter their diversity policies to be more clearly race neutral.
The Supreme Court ruling could, indirectly, present challenges to D.E.I. policies.
“This makes it easier for them to get their day in court,” said Jeff Jennings, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian-minded public interest law firm. “If I was discriminated against based on race or other characteristics because of an affirmative action policy or a D.E.I. policy, this gives me an opportunity to push back.”
Noam Scheiber is a Times reporter covering white-collar workers, focusing on issues such as pay, artificial intelligence, downward mobility and discrimination. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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