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6 

BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY 

Opinion of the Court 

occurred both because the defendant ran a red light and be-
cause the plaintiff failed to signal his turn at the intersec-
tion, we might call each a but-for cause of the collision.  Cf. 
Burrage  v.  United  States,  571  U. S.  204,  211–212  (2014). 
When it comes to Title VII, the adoption of the traditional
but-for causation standard means a defendant cannot avoid 
liability just by citing some other factor that contributed to 
its challenged employment decision.  So long as the plain-
tiff ’s  sex  was  one  but-for  cause  of  that  decision,  that  is 
enough to trigger the law.  See ibid.; Nassar, 570 U. S., at 
350. 

No doubt, Congress could have taken a more parsimoni-
ous  approach.  As  it  has  in  other  statutes,  it  could  have 
added  “solely”  to  indicate  that  actions  taken  “because  of ” 
the confluence of multiple factors do not violate the law.  Cf. 
11 U. S. C. §525; 16 U. S. C. §511.  Or it could have written 
“primarily because of ” to indicate that the prohibited factor
had to be the main cause of the defendant’s challenged em-
ployment decision.  Cf. 22 U. S. C. §2688.  But none of this 
is the law we have.  If anything, Congress has moved in the 
opposite direction, supplementing Title VII in 1991 to allow 
a  plaintiff  to  prevail  merely  by  showing  that  a  protected 
trait  like  sex  was  a  “motivating  factor”  in  a  defendant’s 
challenged employment practice.  Civil Rights Act of 1991,
§107, 105 Stat. 1075,  codified at 42 U. S. C. §2000e–2(m). 
Under this more forgiving standard, liability can sometimes
follow even if sex wasn’t a but-for cause of the employer’s 
challenged decision.  Still, because nothing in our analysis 
depends on the motivating factor test, we focus on the more
traditional but-for causation standard that continues to af-
ford a viable, if no longer exclusive, path to relief under Ti-
tle VII.  §2000e–2(a)(1). 

As sweeping as even the but-for causation standard can
be,  Title  VII  does  not  concern  itself  with  everything  that 
happens “because of ” sex.  The statute imposes liability on