Section 7

Citation: Section 7
Parent Document: Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020)
Jurisdiction: United States (federal)
Effective Date: 2020-06-15
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4760997/bostock-v-clayton-county/ ↗

Full Text

2,188 chars

too. Maybe the law concerns itself simply with ensuring
that employers don’t treat women generally less favorably
than they do men. So how can we tell which sense, individ-
ual or group, “discriminate” carries in Title VII?
   The statute answers that question directly. It tells us
three times—including immediately after the words “dis-
criminate against”—that our focus should be on individu-
als, not groups: Employers may not “fail or refuse to hire
or . . . discharge any individual, or otherwise . . . discrimi-
nate against any individual with respect to his compensa-
tion, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, be-
cause of such individual’s . . . sex.”         §2000e–2(a)(1)
(emphasis added). And the meaning of “individual” was as
uncontroversial in 1964 as it is today: “A particular being
as distinguished from a class, species, or collection.” Web-
ster’s New International Dictionary, at 1267. Here, again,
Congress could have written the law differently. It might
have said that “it shall be an unlawful employment practice
to prefer one sex to the other in hiring, firing, or the terms
or conditions of employment.” It might have said that there
should be no “sex discrimination,” perhaps implying a focus
on differential treatment between the two sexes as groups.
More narrowly still, it could have forbidden only “sexist pol-
icies” against women as a class. But, once again, that is not
the law we have.
   The consequences of the law’s focus on individuals rather
than groups are anything but academic. Suppose an em-
ployer fires a woman for refusing his sexual advances. It’s
no defense for the employer to note that, while he treated
that individual woman worse than he would have treated a
man, he gives preferential treatment to female employees
overall. The employer is liable for treating this woman
worse in part because of her sex. Nor is it a defense for an
employer to say it discriminates against both men and
women because of sex. This statute works to protect indi-
viduals of both sexes from discrimination, and does so
                  Cite as: 590 U. S. ____ (2020)             9 Opinion of the Court

Other Sections in This Document (1015)

Full Text