In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court lowered the bar for employees trying to show employment discrimination, unfair treatment, or discriminatory practices at work in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis.¹ Two years later, developing legal precedent following the Muldrow decision provides useful insight for employers into how courts are currently thinking about adverse employment action in discrimination claims.

Muldrow v. City of St. Louis and the Some Harm Standard

In Muldrow, the Supreme Court addressed the threshold that an employment decision must meet to be considered “adverse” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the main federal law prohibiting workplace discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. The employee in that case was a police officer who alleged she was transferred because of her sex from a prestigious Intelligence Division position (where she worked with the FBI, wore plain clothes, and had a take-home vehicle) to a uniformed patrol supervisor role with more administrative duties and weekend work. Although her pay and rank did not change, she claimed the transfer was discriminatory because the terms and conditions of her employment were negatively affected.

The lower courts dismissed the case because the officer could not show a material employment disadvantage. In an increasingly rare 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed, holding that Title VII does not require proof of significant harm. Instead, employees need only show that their employer’s discriminatory decision had “some harm” on the terms, conditions, or privileges of their employment. This SCOTUS opinion resolved a decades-long split amongst circuit courts that had all been defining “adverse action” slightly differently.

The Post-Muldrow Landscape for Title VII Discrimination Claims

Although Muldrow involved a job transfer, the decision implicates far more than just cases involving employee transfers. Since the ruling, federal courts have increasingly applied the new some harm standard to a range of workplace decisions, including assignments, accommodations, scheduling changes, leave decisions, and other aspects of employment. Courts have emphasized that the key question is no longer whether the employee suffered a major economic loss, but whether the employer’s action negatively impacted some aspect of the employee’s working conditions.

Project Assignments

In Riggs v. Akamai Techs.,² a female sales employee’s yearly performance evaluation was adversely affected when her employer reassigned one of her “large, top-tier” client accounts to her male counterpart, causing her to narrowly miss her yearly quota. The employee also alleged that she was given smaller, “problematic” clients to free up her male counterparts’ time to deal with the company’s more “prestigious” accounts.

The court found that under Muldrow, the female employee had a plausible discrimination claim that was allowed to move forward based on these assignment decisions. Even though the negative performance review did not result in a demotion or pay cut, the harm in question was the act of giving the female employee the smaller, more difficult accounts in favor of her male equivalents in a way that damaged her ability to meet the requisite quota.

Denial of Requested Accommodations

In Peifer v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,³ a state parole/probation officer requested a light-duty assignment when certain field functions were deemed unsafe for her complicated pregnancy. The state initially denied her requests but later reversed course and granted the light-duty assignment. By then, it was too late; the employee had already been on unpaid leave for two months, a situation that the Third Circuit found could support a finding of adverse action based on pregnancy.

In Cole v. Grp. Health Plan, Inc.,⁴ the employer (a nonprofit healthcare organization) had imposed a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for its staff. Vaccinated employees were given an orange badge that permitted them to remove their PPE in certain areas of the building. While it granted requests for employees’ religious exemptions to getting the vaccine, the employer denied one unvaccinated employee’s request to be exempted from the badge and PPE rules as well. The employee argued that the policy visibly singled out unvaccinated employees and subjected them to scrutiny from coworkers in a discriminatory manner. The court allowed the argument to move forward under the more employee-friendly framework of Muldrow.

Networking & Professional Advancement Opportunities

Muldrow, Riggs, and a Ninth Circuit case, Xu v. LightSmyth Technologies, Inc.,⁵ all expressly point to loss of networking and professional opportunities resulting from an employer’s decision as recognizable harm that may be discriminatory.

The officer in Muldrow had previously worked alongside federal agents and on high-profile intelligence investigations before being reassigned to a traditional street patrol supervision role. The lost networking opportunities, colleague interaction, and overall visibility as a professional were among the circumstances the Supreme Court relied on to find that the transfer plausibly caused “some harm” to the officer. Likewise, in Riggs, the professional contacts and opportunities lost when the female sales employee was taken off her employer’s most prestigious accounts were material to the court’s determination that the reassignment was detrimental.

In Xu, the employee in question was transferred from an exempt managerial role to a non-exempt position with different job duties during the interactive process under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Reasonable accommodation questions aside, the Ninth Circuit concluded that such a transfer is the type of harm that may be evidence of discrimination absent other legally valid justification by the employer.

Not All Negative Actions Meet the Some Harm Standard

At the same time, courts have also declined to find all negative actions by an employer to be sufficiently “disadvantageous” to count as discrimination under the law.

In Walsh v. HNTB Corp.,⁶ the First Circuit found that a Performance Improvement Plan (a “PIP”) that did not impact the employee’s pay, job duties, transfer opportunities, or other terms and conditions of employment was not sufficient harm to make up a colorable discrimination claim. Other courts have found that undesirable work assignments,⁷ admonishment of an employee without any formal consequences,⁸ and exclusion of an employee from meetings unrelated to their position⁹ were not sufficiently harmful under the Muldrow standard.

What Does the Muldrow Standard Mean for Nevada Employers?

The developing case law after Muldrow underscores that employers should no longer assume a discrimination claim is unlikely to succeed simply because an employee’s pay, title, or benefits were not affected. Courts are increasingly looking at whether an employee lost meaningful responsibilities, professional opportunities, scheduling flexibility, chances to network, or other workplace advantages as a result of an employer’s decisions.

Even so, Muldrow does not mean every negative workplace experience will support a discrimination claim. The post-Muldrow cases demonstrate that the legal outcomes in discrimination cases remain highly fact-specific with an eye towards the real-world impact of the employer’s decisions. For employers, the most important safeguard is ensuring that employment decisions are supported by legitimate business reasons, applied consistently, and appropriately documented for each and every employee.

By: Shay Digenan, Esq.

1. 144 S. Ct. 967 (2024). ↩︎
2. 2024 WL 3347032 (S.D.N.Y. July 8, 2024). ↩︎
3. 106 F.4th 270 (3d Cir. 2024). ↩︎
4. 105 F.4th 1110. ↩︎
5. 2025 WL 1034873 (9th Cir. Apr. 8, 2025). ↩︎
6. No. 24-1499, 2026 WL 710036 (1st Cir. Mar. 13, 2026). ↩︎
7. Budhan v. Brightworks Sustainability LLC, 2025 WL 919926 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 26, 2025). ↩︎
8. Rios v. Centerra Group LLC, 106 F.4th 101 (1st Cir. 2024). ↩︎
9. Williams v. Memphis Light, Gas & Water, 2024 WL 342171 (6th Cir. 2024). ↩︎

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