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/ ↗

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necessary to the result if a member of the opposite sex
might face the same outcome from the same policy?
   What the employers see as unique isn’t even unusual. Of-
ten in life and law two but-for factors combine to yield a
result that could have also occurred in some other way. Im-
agine that it’s a nice day outside and your house is too
warm, so you decide to open the window. Both the cool tem-
perature outside and the heat inside are but-for causes of
your choice to open the window. That doesn’t change just
because you also would have opened the window had it been
warm outside and cold inside. In either case, no one would
deny that the window is open “because of ” the outside tem-
perature. Our cases are much the same. So, for example,
when it comes to homosexual employees, male sex and at-
traction to men are but-for factors that can combine to get
them fired. The fact that female sex and attraction to
women can also get an employee fired does no more than
show the same outcome can be achieved through the com-
bination of different factors. In either case, though, sex
plays an essential but-for role.
   At bottom, the employers’ argument unavoidably comes
down to a suggestion that sex must be the sole or primary
cause of an adverse employment action for Title VII liability
to follow. And, as we’ve seen, that suggestion is at odds
with everything we know about the statute. Consider an
employer eager to revive the workplace gender roles of the
1950s. He enforces a policy that he will hire only men as
mechanics and only women as secretaries. When a quali-
fied woman applies for a mechanic position and is denied,
the “simple test” immediately spots the discrimination: A
qualified man would have been given the job, so sex was a
but-for cause of the employer’s refusal to hire. But like the
employers before us today, this employer would say not so
fast. By comparing the woman who applied to be a me-
chanic to a man who applied to be a mechanic, we’ve quietly
                  Cite as: 590 U. S. ____ (2020)           23 Opinion of the Court

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