Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, 2024 U.S. LEXIS 1816 (S. Ct. April 17, 2024) (Kagan, J.).
Sergeant Jatonya Clayborn Muldrow maintains that her employer, the St. Louis Police Department, transferred her from one job to another because she is a woman. She sued the City of St. Louis under Title VII, alleging that she had suffered sex discrimination with respect to the “terms [or] conditions” of her employment. 42 U. S. C. §2000e-2(a)(1). The courts below rejected the claim on the ground that the transfer did not cause Muldrow a “significant” employment disadvantage. Other courts have used similar standards in addressing Title VII suits arising from job transfers.
Today, we disapprove that approach. Although an employee must show some harm from a forced transfer to prevail in a Title VII suit, she need not show that the injury satisfies a significance test. Title VII’s text nowhere establishes that high bar.
What the transferee does not have to show, according to the relevant text, is that the harm incurred was “significant.” 30 F. 4th, at 688. Or serious, or substantial, or any similar adjective suggesting that the disadvantage to the employee must exceed a heightened bar. See supra, at 4, and 4-5, n. 1. “Discriminate against” means treat worse, here based on sex. See, e.g., Bostock, 590 U. S., at 657-658, 681, 140 S. Ct. 1731, 207 L. Ed. 2d 218. But neither that phrase nor any other says anything about how much worse. There is nothing in the provision to distinguish, as the courts below did, between transfers causing significant disadvantages and transfers causing not-so-significant ones. And there is nothing to otherwise establish an elevated threshold of harm. To demand “significance” is to add words—and significant words, as it were—to the statute Congress enacted. It is to impose a new requirement on a Title VII claimant, so that the law as applied demands something more of her than the law as written.
All we require is that they use the proper Title VII standard, and not demand that Muldrow demonstrate her transfer caused “significant” harm.
We accordingly vacate the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
