Peak majority/minority who is the most minorityized confusion achieved.

The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled in favor of a straight woman who twice lost positions to gay workers, saying an appeals court had been wrong to require her to meet a heightened burden in seeking to prove workplace discrimination because she was a member of a majority group.

Because what? Because she was a member of what?

News flash: women are not the dominant aka preferred aka privileged sex. Women are the sex seen as weak and stupid and not as good as the alternative sex. It’s not about majority or minority, it’s about being perceived as inferior. The two are not the same, and people in a “majority” can be perceived as inferior. Slaves were very often the majority on plantations, but that didn’t make them more powerful or privileged or rewarded, now did it.

The decision came two years after the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs in higher education and amid the Trump administration’s fierce efforts to root out programs that promote diversity and could make it easier for white people, men and other members of majority groups to pursue claims of employment discrimination.

What mean “other members of majority groups”? Men aren’t members of majority groups, men are roughly half. The power differential between women and men isn’t about more v fewer, it’s about which sex can punch harder. It’s also about a lot more than that – who gestates, for a start – but my point is that the issue here is that journalism should stop using “majority” as a synonym for “dominant” or similar. It just confuses things.

Ms. Ames sued under a federal civil rights law that forbids employment discrimination based on, among other characteristics, sex. (The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that discrimination based on sexual orientation is a form of sex discrimination for purposes of the civil rights law.)

The text of the law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, does not draw distinctions based on whether the person claiming discrimination is a member of a majority group. But some courts have required plaintiffs from majority groups to prove an additional element if they lack direct evidence of discrimination: “background circumstances that support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.”

But it’s not unusual. It’s not unusual for employers to discriminate against women. “Majority” is not what you mean here! If even Supreme Court rulings can’t get it right what hope is there? And it’s not just a picky word-freak item, either, because it obviously matters. It seems to be the very subject of the ruling, and yet nobody can say so.

Lower courts ruled against Ms. Ames on those grounds. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said she could have satisfied the “background circumstances” requirement by showing that decisions about her employment were made by “a member of the relevant minority group (here, gay people)” or with statistical evidence. But the appeals court said Ms. Ames had provided neither kind of proof.

So it has to be a literal minority group in this one case? So which sex is the minority sex? Please inform.