Young v. United Parcel Service, Inc.
The Court ruled that a pregnant UPS driver denied light duty for a lifting restriction could still take her case to a jury, because federal law lets courts weigh whether an employer's refusal to accommodate pregnancy, while formally neutral, actually reflects intentional discrimination.
Rather than adopting either side's all-or-nothing reading of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Court crafted a middle path: pregnant workers can point to how heavily and broadly an employer accommodates other similarly limited workers as evidence that leaving out pregnant employees was pretextual.
“Ultimately the court must determine whether the nature of the employer's policy and the way in which it burdens pregnant women shows that the employer has engaged in intentional discrimination.”
The majority's core standard for evaluating pregnancy accommodation claims.
How it got here: A federal trial court granted UPS summary judgment; the Fourth Circuit affirmed; Young asked the Supreme Court to review the pregnancy-accommodation standard.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Peggy Young worked as a part-time UPS driver whose doctor restricted her from lifting more than 20 pounds during pregnancy. UPS required drivers to lift up to 70 pounds and told Young she could not work under any lifting restriction, so she went unpaid for most of her pregnancy and lost her medical coverage. UPS accommodated other workers—those hurt on the job, those with ADA disabilities, and those who lost driving certifications—but not Young.
The question before the Court
Could a pregnant delivery driver force her employer to give her the same light-duty accommodations it gave some, but not all, injured coworkers?
Why it matters
Pregnant workers with physical restrictions gain a clearer path to challenge employer policies that accommodate many other disabled or injured workers but exclude pregnancy. Employers with multiple light-duty programs must now consider whether excluding pregnancy from all of them could look like discrimination, even without any express anti-pregnancy policy.
What changes now
The case returns to the Fourth Circuit to decide, under the newly clarified standard, whether Young presented enough evidence that UPS's justifications for denying her accommodation were pretextual. This is a final merits ruling on how the Pregnancy Discrimination Act's second clause works, but it does not resolve Young's individual claim, which still requires further fact-finding on remand.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Young actually proved intentional discrimination—that question goes back to the lower court. It also expressly declined to address how the 2008 ADA Amendments Act, which broadened disability coverage after Young's pregnancy, might affect similar cases going forward.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Alito
Justice Alito agreed the case should be sent back but reasoned differently. He read the PDA's second clause as an independent requirement, separate from proving discriminatory intent, that pregnant workers be compared to nonpregnant workers doing similar jobs. He would allow employers to treat pregnant workers differently only if they have a genuine neutral business reason, not merely cost or convenience.
Dissent — Justice Scalia
“It takes only a couple of waves of the Supreme Wand to produce the desired result.”Scalia's mocking objection to the majority's newly crafted legal test.
Justice Scalia argued the Court invented a legal standard, the significant-burden and sufficiently-strong-justification test, found nowhere in the statute's text. He argued the only sensible reading of the same-treatment clause bars discriminating against pregnancy specifically, not any evenhanded, neutral policy that happens to exclude pregnant workers, and would have ruled for UPS.
Dissent — Justice Kennedy
Justice Kennedy joined Scalia's dissent in full but wrote separately to stress that pregnant workers still face serious workplace disadvantages as a matter of broader social concern, even though this particular employer showed no hostility toward pregnancy. He noted other laws, like the FMLA and ADA amendments, that address these problems, but agreed UPS's neutral policy did not violate the PDA.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting framework, the standard three-step process courts use when a plaintiff relies on circumstantial rather than direct evidence to prove intentional discrimination.
- Under this framework, a pregnant worker can establish a preliminary case by showing she sought an accommodation, was denied one, and that the employer accommodated other workers similar in their ability or inability to work; the employer can then offer a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for the difference.
- The Court rejected Young's argument that any accommodation given to any nonpregnant worker automatically entitled her to the same treatment, reasoning that this 'most-favored-nation' reading would grant pregnant workers broader rights than the statute's text supports.
- The Court also rejected UPS's view that the statute's second clause merely restates that pregnancy discrimination is sex discrimination, reasoning that this would make the clause redundant and would not fully overturn the Court's earlier decision in General Electric Co. v. Gilbert, the 1976 ruling that had allowed an employer to exclude pregnancy from an otherwise comprehensive disability plan.
- The Court held that a pregnant worker can show an employer's stated reason for denying accommodation is pretextual by proving the policy imposes a significant burden on pregnant workers that the employer's justifications are not strong enough to explain, allowing a jury to infer intentional discrimination.
- Applying this standard to the evidence, the Court concluded that a jury could find UPS's multiple accommodation policies, covering many nonpregnant workers while excluding pregnant ones, significant enough to require further proceedings rather than summary judgment for UPS.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes General Electric Co. v. Gilbert (429 U.S. 125)
The Court explained how its new test differs from and better overturns Gilbert's reasoning than either party's proposed reading.