Even though Hively's case continues to be litigated, it has cleared a huge hurdle and in so doing, generated a significant appellate court decision on the relationship between sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination. Sex discrimination is generally evident in the comparison between how an employer treats an employee of one sex versus how that employer treats another otherwise-identical employee of the other sex. Using this paradigm, the Seventh Circuit reasoned that when an employer treats positively a male employee who has a female partner (or who is attracted to women), but treats adversely a female employee who has a female partner (or who is attracted to women), that is discrimination on the basis of the employee's sex. Though the discrimination targets the fact that the victim of such discrimination is partnered with or attracted to a person of the same sex, i.e., their homosexual orientation, such discrimination "does not exist without taking the victim's... sex...into account." We already know that sex discrimination works in this relational way (discriminating on the basis of some characteristic, like the victim's attraction to women, in relation to the victim's sex), because the Supreme Court endorsed that way of thinking about sex discrimination when it confirmed that it encompassed gender stereotyping. An employer's adverse action towards a female employee who exhibits a certain characteristic or appearance, but not a male employee who does the same is discrimination "that does not exist without taking the victim's sex into account." Additionally, the court considered the Supreme Court's precedent in Loving v. Virginia, which ruled that a state law banning interracial marriage was race discrimination prohibited under the Constitution. If discrimination based on the race one is oriented to is race discrimination, then discrimination based on the sex one is oriented to is sex discrimination.
The Seventh Circuit decision is the first appellate court decision to employ this reasoning (for a lower court example, see Videckis v. Pepperdine, a Title IX case). Other appellate courts in the (sometimes distant) past have ruled against the gay or lesbian plaintiff on the grounds that Congress could have, but did not, include sexual orientation as a Title VII protected characteristic. The Seventh Circuit's departure from this reasoning sets up a circuit split that gives the Supreme Court a reason to weigh in should it so choose. Although the court's decision interprets the sex discrimination provision in Title VII, it and any Supreme Court decision that affirms it, should there be one, will no doubt be influential in the Title IX context as well, since courts routinely refer to definitions of sex discrimination from Title VII cases when analyzing what it means under Title IX.
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