{"id":9890,"date":"2026-02-25T16:17:32","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T16:17:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/supreme-court-clarifies-standard-for-showing-harm-under-title-vii\/"},"modified":"2026-02-25T16:17:32","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T16:17:32","slug":"supreme-court-clarifies-standard-for-showing-harm-under-title-vii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/supreme-court-clarifies-standard-for-showing-harm-under-title-vii\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Clarifies Standard for Showing Harm Under Title VII"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On April 17, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a Title VII plaintiff need only show they suffered \u201csome harm\u201d in an identifiable term or condition of employment, and need not show that the harm was \u201csignificant.\u201d The Court\u2019s decision, Muldrow <\/em>v. City of St. Louis<\/em><\/a>, resolves a split among the federal Circuit Courts of Appeal over whether a Title VII plaintiff needs to show a heightened threshold of harm, finding that \u201cTitle VII imposes no such requirement.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The question presented in Muldrow<\/em> is whether \u201can employee challenging a transfer under Title VII must meet a heightened threshold of harm\u2014be it dubbed significant, serious, or something similar.\u201d The plaintiff, a female St. Louis police sergeant, sued the City of St. Louis after her new commander transferred her from the police department\u2019s prestigious Intelligence Division, where she had worked for nearly a decade. Following the transfer, the plaintiff maintained the same rank and pay, but her responsibilities were changed such that she became responsible for supervising day-to-day activities of neighborhood patrol officers rather than higher profile intelligence work, lost her role as an FBI Task Force Officer (and the associated take-home car), and began to work an irregular \u201crotating schedule,\u201d which included weekend work.<\/p>\n

The District Court granted summary judgment to the City, finding that Muldrow had failed to show that this transfer constituted a \u201csignificant\u201d change in the plaintiff\u2019s working conditions. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision, finding that a Title VII plaintiff must show that a discriminatory job transfer results in a \u201cmaterially significant disadvantage\u201d for the employee.<\/p>\n

On review, the Supreme Court rejected the notion that Title VII imposes a requirement to show a heightened threshold of harm. The Court held instead that, given the statutory language of Title VII prohibits \u201cdiscriminat[ing] against\u201d an individual with respect to the \u201cterms [or] conditions\u201d of employment because of that individual\u2019s gender, a plaintiff need only show that the transfer caused a \u201cdisadvantageous\u201d change in an employment term or condition. The Court wrote, \u201cTo make out a Title VII discrimination claim, a transferee must show some harm respecting an identifiable term or condition of employment. What the transferee does not have to show . . . is that the harm incurred was significant . . . . [o]r serious, or substantial, or any similar adjective suggesting that the disadvantage to the employee must exceed a heightened bar.\u201d The Court reasoned that anything else would be to \u201cimpose a new requirement on a Title VII claimant,\u201d so that the law as applied demands \u201csomething more of her than the law as written.\u201d<\/p>\n

Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh filed concurring opinions. Justice Thomas wrote that he was unconvinced the Eighth Circuit had actually applied a heightened standard, and wrote that a Title VII plaintiff must show \u201cmore than a trifling harm.\u201d Justice Alito said the terms \u201charm\u201d and \u201cinjury\u201d already \u201cincorporate at least some degree of significance or substantiality.\u201d Justice Kavanaugh wrote that \u201c[t]he only question\u201d is \u201cwhether the relevant employment action changes the compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment,\u201d because \u201c[t]he discrimination is [the] harm.\u201d<\/p>\n

This decision follows the Supreme Court\u2019s June 2023 decision<\/a> in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc.<\/em> v. President and Fellows of Harvard College<\/em>, in which a majority of the Court held that Harvard\u2019s and the University of North Carolina\u2019s consideration of race as a factor in admissions violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by extension. In that opinion, the majority wrote that \u201c[e]liminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.\u201d Although the Students for Fair Admissions<\/em> decision addressed college affirmative action programs, Justice Gorsuch noted in a concurrence that Title VI uses \u201cessentially identical terms\u201d as Title VII, and that both Titles \u201ccodify a categorical rule of individual equality, without regard to race.\u201d As discussed in our podcast, litigants are expected to continue the recent trend of using decisions like Students for Fair Admissions <\/em>and Muldrow <\/em>to challenge aspects of employer diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On April 17, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a Title VII plaintiff need only show they suffered \u201csome harm\u201d in an identifiable term or condition of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9891,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1329,143,347,7507,3655,533,913,914],"class_list":["post-9890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-clarifies","tag-court","tag-harm","tag-showing","tag-standard","tag-supreme","tag-title","tag-vii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9890\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}