Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against employees because of their race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Employees (or ex-employees) can make discrimination cases under Title VII by proving that discrimination was either (1) the \u201cdeterminative factor\u201d in an adverse employment action (disparate treatment), or (2) a \u201cmotivating factor\u201d in the adverse action even if nondiscriminatory factors were also involved (\u201cmixed-motives\u201d). Because the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) was modeled after Title VII, many courts and employment attorneys assumed that both methods of proving discrimination also applied to the ADEA. <\/p>\n
Yesterday, in Gross v. PBL Financial Services Inc.<\/em>, the United States Supreme Court held that the \u201cmixed-motives\u201d method of proving discrimination does not apply to age discrimination claims brought under the ADEA. The Supreme Court assumed that Congress acted deliberately when it amended Title VII in 1991 to authorize \u201cmixed-motives\u201d claims, but did not make a similar amendment to the ADEA. The Supreme Court then interpreted the ADEA\u2019s prohibition against discriminating \u201cbecause of\u201d an individual\u2019s age to mean that age must be the \u201cbut-for\u201d cause of an employer\u2019s adverse action. Ultimately, the Supreme Court held that \u201ca plaintiff must prove by a preponderance of evidence (which may be direct or circumstantial), that age was the \u201cbut-for\u201d cause of the challenged employer decision.\u201d<\/p>\n Clearly, the Gross<\/em> decision is a victory for employers. However, it may be short-lived as Congress could respond by amending the ADEA to expressly authorize \u201cmixed-motives\u201d age discrimination claims as it did with Title VII. Furthermore, it remains to be seen whether the \u201cmixed-motives\u201d method of proving discrimination will apply to age discrimination cases brought under California\u2019s Fair Employment and Housing Act.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against employees because of their race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Employees (or ex-employees) can make discrimination cases under Title VII by proving that discrimination was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlevylaw.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlevylaw.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlevylaw.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlevylaw.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlevylaw.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/davidlevylaw.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":297,"href":"https:\/\/davidlevylaw.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlevylaw.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlevylaw.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlevylaw.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}