On April 17, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for workers to bring employment discrimination suits over job transfers based on sex, race, religion, or national origin.

Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, Missouri involved a police sergeant who brought claims of gender discrimination against her employer after she was transferred from an assignment as a plainclothes officer in the intelligence section to a uniformed role (despite receiving high-performance evaluations) on the grounds that intelligence work was “too dangerous” for her. Although her rank and pay remained the same after the transfer, the plaintiff lost her FBI status and associated car and had to work a less favorable schedule. A federal district court judge ruled in favor of the police department, and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the transfer, both on the grounds that, because the plaintiff could not show any "diminution to her title, salary, or benefits," her claims of discrimination were not "significant." 

In a majority opinion authored by Justice Kagan, the Supreme Court reversed the lower courts, laying out a more stringent test to use in determining whether a discrimination claim based on a job transfer can proceed to trial and eliminating the requirement that any harm suffered must be “significant” or “material.” Federal anti-discrimination law covers not only economic discrimination; it prohibits discrimination in the "terms" and "conditions" of employment." In the Supreme Court's view, that covers a transfer that changed "nothing less than the what, where, and when of [plaintiff's] police work."

Muldrow changes the equation significantly for these cases - the bar for surviving summary judgment is now much lower, as a plaintiff need only show some harm for a plaintiff to proceed to trial. The decision discusses other cases in which the “harm” suffered by the employee was not “significant” under the previous test but may qualify under the new standard of “some harm,” including a shipping worker being transferred to a position involving only nighttime work, a school principal transferred to a non-school-based administrative role supervising fewer employees, and an engineering technician's reassignment to work in a wind tunnel. In Muldrow, the harm was the change in schedule as well as the loss in FBI status and associated benefits. 

Muldrow will inevitably result in more claims reaching a jury, especially considering Justice Kagan's reasoning that significance is “in the eye of the beholder.”