‘Reverse discrimination’ was an enduring 2025 workplace trend

Was the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission soliciting White men for workplace discrimination charges on the bingo card for 2025? Maybe. For many HR professionals and both management-side and employee-side attorneys, “reverse discrimination” has long been on the radar.

As early as 2024, lawyers had a key suggestion for employers regarding reverse discrimination: “Know your tolerance for risk.” That advice aged well when, throughout 2025, allegations of discrimination from White people, men, straight people and cisgender people increasingly made headlines.

Around this time last year, the Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services case made waves because a heterosexual woman claimed discrimination based on her sex and sexual orientation, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear her case. SCOTUS unanimously sided with the plaintiff last summer.

In between the case reaching the highest court in the land and the judges’ final ruling, majority-group discrimination increasingly made headlines. For example, conservative advocacy groups filed an EEOC charge alleging that the American Bar Association’s diversity clerkship program violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Similarly, Starbucks caught heat from the Missouri attorney general’s office for its DEI policies, with the AG alleging that the coffee company’s programming gave preferential treatment to minority workers.

In March, a judge ended up siding with the plaintiff in Barnes v. 3M Company, Inc., agreeing that 3M treated a White man unfairly compared to his two Black women colleagues. But that same month, a court dismissed the lawsuit brought by a White man at Penn State Abington who claimed that campus antiracism conversations created a hostile work environment.

And that was just the beginning of the year. Here are the other reverse discrimination cases that workplaces faced throughout 2025.