In the

United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ 

No. 22-3275 

KIMBERLY BARNES-STAPLES, 

Plaintiff-Appellant, 

v.

ROBIN CARNAHAN,* Administrator, 

General Services Administration, 

Defendant-Appellee. 

____________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. 

No. 20-cv-03627 — Virginia M. Kendall, Judge. 

____________________ 

ARGUED SEPTEMBER 27, 2023 — DECIDED DECEMBER 18, 2023 

____________________ 

Before SYKES, Chief Judge, and FLAUM and LEE, Circuit 

Judges. 

FLAUM, Circuit Judge. Kimberly Barnes-Staples applied for

a Real Estate Director position with the General Services 

* The Court has substituted Robin Carnahan, the current Administrator for the United States General Services Administration, for the original 

defendant, Emily W. Murphy. See Fed. R. App. P. 43(c)(2).
2 No. 22-3275 

Administration (GSA), but the GSA hired a different candidate. Staples sued, alleging that the GSA’s interview process 

discriminated against her because of her race and sex in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The district court 

granted summary judgment in favor of the GSA, and for the 

following reasons, we affirm.

I. Background

A. Factual Background 

In March 2019, the GSA announced a job opening for a regional Real Estate Director. As the job posting explained, the 

position was at the GS-15 pay grade, and applicants needed

“at least one year of specialized experience equivalent to the 

GS-14 level or higher in the Federal service” to be considered.

No additional educational or professional accreditations were 

listed in the vacancy announcement. Rather, as the posting 

explained, candidates would be evaluated based on their responses to job-related interview questions. 

The GSA began its hiring process by screening applicants 

through written applications. From there, it advanced five 

candidates to a first round of interviews: Kimberly BarnesStaples, a Black woman; Matt Poisson, Russell Riberto, and 

Joseph Skach, all White men; and Shery Wittstock, a White 

woman. 

The GSA uses an internal document referred to as the 

Guideline when interviewing candidates. Included in the 

Guideline are procedures that seek to help prevent unlawful 

discrimination in the GSA’s hiring process. To accord with 

these procedures, a three-person panel conducted the firstround interview for the five candidates. Candidates were all
No. 22-3275 3

asked the same questions and given equal time to answer. The

interviewers independently scored the candidates’ answers 

on each question from one to five. The panelists then collaborated to create consensus scores for each candidate’s answers 

to each question, which were in turn used to calculate overall 

scores for the five candidates. Their overall scores were as follows: (1) Wittstock, 3.9; (2) Riberto, 3.8; (3) Staples, 3.15; (4) 

Poisson, 3.1; and (5) Skach, 2.85. At the time of the interviews,

Poisson was the Real Estate Division’s Acting Director, so the 

panel designed the scoring cutoff to advance all candidates at 

or above his score to the second and final round. 

A new set of three panelists conducted the second-round

interviews. Before discovering who advanced to that round, 

the second panel devised three new interview questions

aimed at assessing the candidates’ decision-making and problem-solving skills. Just as in the first round of interviews, the 

second panel agreed that Wittstock had the strongest secondround interview performance. As a result, the GSA offered 

her the Real Estate Director position.

B. Procedural Background

Staples attributed the GSA’s decision to hire a different 

candidate to sex and race discrimination, so she filed an EEOC 

complaint. After the EEOC dismissed it, Staples filed suit for 

violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.1 The GSA moved 

1 In addition to her race and sex discrimination claims, her complaint 

also alleged a retaliation claim. The district court dismissed this claim because Staples did not exhaust her administrative remedies. Barnes-Staples 

v. Murphy, No. 20 C 3627, 2022 WL 4534686, at *6 (N.D. Ill. Sept. 28, 2022). 

She does not press her retaliation claim on appeal, so we decline to entertain it further. Ezell v. Potter, 400 F.3d 1041, 1045 n.1 (7th Cir. 2005).
4 No. 22-3275 

for summary judgment, which the district court granted. Staples now appeals.

II. Discussion

We review the district court’s summary judgment ruling 

de novo and “construe all facts and draw all reasonable inferences in the nonmoving party’s favor.” Lewis v. Ind. Wesleyan 

Univ., 36 F.4th 755, 759 (7th Cir. 2022). “[T]he moving party 

may prevail by showing an absence of evidence to support 

the nonmoving party’s claims.” Id. (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 

Title VII prohibits employers from “refus[ing] to 

hire ... any individual ... because of such individual’s race 

[or] ... sex.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1). “[T]o hold the [GSA] liable, [Staples] must show that her race [or sex] ‘played a part’ 

in” the hiring decision. Crain v. McDonough, 63 F.4th 585, 591 

(7th Cir. 2023) (citation omitted). “She can do so through direct or circumstantial evidence of discrimination.” Id. In evaluating Staples’s claims, we ask whether “a reasonable jury

[could] find based on all available evidence that a discriminatory ... motive caused” the GSA to select a different candidate 

for the Real Estate Director job over Staples. Grant v. Trs. of 

Ind. Univ., 870 F.3d 562, 569 (7th Cir. 2017). 

Staples brings her claims under the McDonnell Douglas 

burden-shifting framework. McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 

411 U.S. 792, 802–07 (1973); see also Ferrill v. Oak Creek-Franklin 

Joint Sch. Dist., 860 F.3d 494, 499–500 (7th Cir. 2017) (applying

the McDonnell Douglas framework). The GSA concedes that 

Staples has stated a prima facie case of discrimination, but it

presents a “legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason” for hiring 
No. 22-3275 5

another candidate: Wittstock was more qualified. See Lewis, 36 

F.4th at 760. 

Consequently, “the burden shifts back to [Staples] to submit evidence that the [GSA’s] explanation is pretextual,” 

McDaniel v. Progress Rail Locomotive, Inc., 940 F.3d 360, 368 (7th 

Cir. 2019), meaning it is a “lie” or a “phony reason.” Ferrill,

860 F.3d at 500. If the GSA “honestly believed” it made the 

correct employment decision—even if its decision was “inaccurate[,] unfair[,] ... foolish, trivial, or baseless”—Staples’s 

claims cannot succeed. Coleman v. Donahoe, 667 F.3d 835, 852–

53 (7th Cir. 2012) (citation omitted). 

A. Race Discrimination

Staples advances multiple arguments supporting her racial discrimination claims. She argues that the GSA did not

follow its internal antidiscrimination procedures, which allowed it to hire an inferior candidate. Staples further contends

that she was the superior candidate, so the GSA’s offered hiring justification—that Wittstock was the better candidate—

was pretextual. Operating in the background, Staples asserts, 

is a GSA practice of discrimination against Black candidates

and employees. 

1. Failure to Follow Procedures

According to Staples, one of the GSA’s second-round interview questions violated the Guideline because it was “tailored to a specific candidate.” She further contends that the 

question also contravened the Guideline’s suggestion to not 

ask questions that assess competencies learned on the job.2

2 Although the parties dispute whether the Guideline applied during 

the GSA’s second-round interviews, we assume for the sake of this 
6 No. 22-3275 

These shortcomings, she explains, evince the GSA’s pretextual representation that it hired the best candidate in Wittstock. The question asked about the following scenario: “The 

Commissioner has increased the leasing performance standards for the Region by 50%. How would you address this challenge?” 

The first stumbling block for Staples’s argument is that the 

panel drafted the question before it knew the identities of the 

second-round candidates. On the contrary, the person who 

wrote the question did not know that Wittstock would make 

it to the second round. Still, Staples speculates that the GSA 

created this question for Wittstock because she could answer 

it well based on her experience. Nothing she points to in the 

record, however, suggests that the second panel tailored the 

question to Wittstock. Consequently, there is no evidence that 

the second question violated the Guideline’s prohibition 

against questions that give a specific candidate an unfair advantage over others.

The question also did not violate the Guideline by asking

about a competency expected to be learned on the job. The 

Guideline’s examples of on-the-job competency questions—

such as those relating to a candidate’s familiarity with an internal company policy or procedure—go to information

uniquely accessible to only internal candidates. Answering 

the leasing performance question did not depend on this type 

of Real Estate Division-specific prior knowledge. Rather, it is 

an expertise-based hypothetical question routinely asked 

opinion that it does because its application does not affect our ultimate 

conclusion.
No. 22-3275 7

during job interviews to assess candidates’ problem-solving

skills—as described in the vacancy announcement. 

Staples also asserts that the GSA’s failure to employ a 

ranked scoring system during the second-round interviews

violated the Guideline. The lack of an objective scoring system, she contests, allowed the panel to “manipulate[] the process” to her disadvantage and in favor of Wittstock. This

Court, however, “has ... never held that a job interview must 

be scored according to some sort of objective criteria” to avoid 

triggering Title VII liability. Blise v. Antaramian, 409 F.3d 861, 

868 (7th Cir. 2005). Indeed, “nothing in Title VII bans outright 

the use of subjective evaluation criteria.” Sattar v. Motorola, 

Inc., 138 F.3d 1164, 1170 (7th Cir. 1998).

Still, it is true that an employer’s divergence from its 

standard hiring practices can establish, or at least be evidence 

of, pretext and defeat summary judgment. Rudin v. Lincoln 

Land Cmty. Coll., 420 F.3d 712, 727 (7th Cir. 2005). We have 

placed a particular emphasis on this principle when an employer has applied its policies differently between protectedclass and non-protected-class members. Baines v. Walgreen 

Co., 863 F.3d 656, 664–65 (7th Cir. 2017) (holding summary 

judgment improper where manager made “highly unusual” 

deviation from standard rehiring procedures with respect to 

a Black candidate); Buie v. Quad/Graphics, Inc., 366 F.3d 496,

508 (7th Cir. 2004) (“The disparate treatment of similarly-situated employees who were involved in misconduct of comparable seriousness, but did not have a similar disability, 

could establish pretext.”). In those cases, “[e]vidence that the 

employer selectively enforced a company policy ... would go 

to ... the pretext analysis.” Coleman, 667 F.3d at 858. 
8 No. 22-3275 

This is not such a case. The lack of a scoring system affected all candidates equally. In any event, the record shows 

that Wittstock performed the best during both the numerically scored first round and the unscored second round. 

Nothing in the record suggests the second panel thought anybody other than Wittstock was the best candidate at any 

point. Sattar, 138 F.3d at 1170–71 (holding that subjective criteria did not support inference of pretext absent evidence that 

criteria were “a mask for discrimination”). The GSA’s failure 

to abide by its policy is “insufficient, without more, to create ... an inference” of pretext. United States ex rel. Hamrick v. 

GlaxoSmithKline LLC, 814 F.3d 10, 22 (1st Cir. 2016). 

2. Credentials and Interviews

Next, we turn to Staples’s contention that the GSA tailored

its hiring criteria to hire the less-qualified Wittstock instead of 

Staples. 

Staples was not “clearly better qualified” than Wittstock 

for the Real Estate Director position, at least when evaluated 

under the GSA’s criteria. Riley v. Elkhart Cmty. Schs., 829 F.3d 

886, 894 (7th Cir. 2016). The job posting’s “qualifications” section only required candidates to have “at least one year of specialized experience equivalent to GS-14 level or higher.” Both 

Staples and Wittstock met this requirement. Beyond that, 

when the GSA hired Wittstock, although Staples had an MBA 

(whereas Wittstock did not), Wittstock had more recent and 

total experience within the Real Estate Division than Staples

did. 

The GSA’s job posting indicated that it would evaluate 

candidates based on their responses to competency-related 

interview questions. However, since “both candidates 
No. 22-3275 9

presented attractive qualifications” and the GSA selected

Wittstock based on interview performance, Staples’s “own 

opinions about [her] ... qualifications [do not] give rise to a 

material factual dispute.” Robertson v. Dep’t of Health Servs., 

949 F.3d 371, 380–81 (7th Cir. 2020) (alteration in original) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 

Since the GSA evaluated candidates based on their answers to interview questions, Staples argues her secondround interview answers were better than Wittstock’s. The 

panelists’ depositions, affidavits, and interview notes refute 

that assertion. Instead, they illustrate the panel’s belief that 

Wittstock provided the strongest responses to their questions. 

While Staples might believe Wittstock’s answers were unimpressive, what matters is whether the GSA believed they were 

unimpressive and then lied about it. See Coleman, 667 F.3d at

852–53 (explaining that what matters is what the GSA “honestly believed” in a pretext analysis). 

Staples’s only substantiated support is a statement from a 

panelist explaining that Wittstock’s answer to one question 

did not discuss what the Division was doing well. That fact 

does not render pretextual the GSA’s professed belief that 

Wittstock was impressive and the best candidate. See Cichon 

v. Exelon Generation Co., 401 F.3d 803, 814 (7th Cir. 2005) (holding that, “in choosing between different candidates, all of 

whom are qualified, an employer may legitimately use subjective qualifications” assessed through interview performance). Although Staples disagrees with the GSA about 

whether she or Wittstock gave the best interview, her disagreement does not give rise to an inference of pretext.

Staples’s claims that the GSA pretextually tailored the Real 

Estate Director job requirements to suit Wittstock also lack 
10 No. 22-3275 

merit: The job posting never required a specific kind of educational background or a technical license. Staples cannot 

fault the GSA for staying true to its job posting by not giving 

those kinds of credentials significant weight in its hiring process. 

Additionally, Staples contests that the GSA did not offer 

her interviews for other positions due to her lack of technical 

expertise. Her argument does not provide evidence as to 

whether those positions required technical expertise from the 

start of the application process or instead added it in later in 

the game. As such, Staples lacks the factual support needed 

to illustrate that the GSA changed its hiring criteria for those 

positions after Staples applied as a pretext for not interviewing her. See Lavite v. Dunstan, 932 F.3d 1020, 1029 n.2 (7th Cir. 

2019) (“Our review cannot include facts outside of the summary judgment record, so we do not consider these assertions ....”). 

3. Statistical Evidence

Staples next offers data on the GSA’s promotion and employment rates for the premise that the GSA “fails to provide 

growth or leadership opportunities in ... higher-level positions” for Black women. In other words, she tries to use evidence of systemic discrimination to bolster her individual 

claims.

For statistical “evidence of a pattern or practice” to support a claim of discrimination brought by an individual (as 

opposed to a class action), it must be coupled with “evidence 

of specific discrimination against the plaintiff herself.” Matthews v. Waukesha County., 759 F.3d 821, 829 (7th Cir. 2014). 

Indeed, data alone cannot get Staples over the hump, as it
No. 22-3275 11

“must be coupled with other evidence, which does most of 

the work.” Baylie v. Fed. Rsrv. Bank, 476 F.3d 522, 524 (7th Cir. 

2007). 

It is also not enough to present raw data. Staples must 

draw statistical inferences from a similarly situated “group” 

within the workforce to provide the factual context necessary 

to show a pattern of discrimination. Matthews, 759 F.3d at 830. 

For example, the data must be sufficiently comparable to the 

“population in the relevant labor market.” Id. Here, much of 

the data Staples cites originates from the GSA’s nationwide 

pay distribution statistics, but Staples attacks the GSA’s hiring 

practices in Region 5. Accordingly, the nationwide data does 

not advance her claim because of its overbroad scope. 

Staples also turns her attention to the GSA’s Region 5, GS15 level promotion and hiring practices since 2010, claiming 

they illustrate an underrepresentation of Black candidates in 

the GSA’s hiring processes. Staples does not provide evidence 

about the makeup of the candidate pool for those positions 

over that timeframe. We do not know how many total candidates applied to Region 5, GS-15 positions since 2010, much 

less how many Black candidates applied. We cannot draw 

conclusions from this data because Staples does not “support 

her claim that [the GSA’s] alleged failure to promote any” 

Black candidates “with sufficient information about the relevant applicant pool.” Sublett v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 463 F.3d 

731, 739 (7th Cir. 2006); see Baylie, 476 F.3d at 526 (plaintiff 

could not use evidence that she was passed over for promotions as evidence of discrimination when she provided “no 

details about who received the promotions, after what process”). 
12 No. 22-3275 

In sum, none of Staples’s evidence indicates race discrimination, even when considered “as a whole.” Crain, 63 F.4th at

591. The district court correctly granted summary judgment 

on that claim. 

B. Sex Discrimination Claim

The district court found that Staples abandoned her sex 

discrimination claim because she did not argue it in her brief 

opposing summary judgment. Barnes-Staples, 2022 WL 

4534686, at *6. On appeal, Staples frames her sex discrimination claim as an “intersectional claim” inextricably tied to 

race. 

We agree with the district court. Even assuming “a[n intersectional] theory of discrimination” can produce a viable 

claim, Staples did not “provide evidence ... that the [GSA] 

took an adverse employment action at least in part on account 

of sex.” Coffman v. Indianapolis Fire Dep’t, 578 F.3d 559, 564 (7th 

Cir. 2009). She made only a passing mention to the lack of 

Black women in GS-15 positions since 2010 within Region 5, 

and she did not illustrate how she was personally discriminated against because of her sex. Since Staples did not develop her sex discrimination argument before the district 

court, she waived it. Reck v. Wexford Health Sources, Inc., 27 

F.4th 473, 485 n.30 (7th Cir. 2022). 

III. Conclusion

For the foregoing reasons, we AFFIRM the district court’s 

grant of summary judgment in favor of the GSA.