Top Workplace Discrimination Cases for Lawyers to Track in 2026

Significant developments are anticipated this year over legal requirements to sustain discrimination claims involving religious accommodation requests, diversity practices, and gender-based harassment.

Companies like United Airlines Inc., Honeywell International Inc., and Walmart Inc. will be in court in 2026 facing accusations of unlawfully denying religious exemptions from Covid-19 vaccine mandates or implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that prioritize non-White employees.

At the same time, the courts are expected to provide further clarity on the viability of a longstanding judge-made requirement for a plaintiff to show their employer tried to cover up unlawful bias to reach trial, and what gender discrimination claims may be covered by the 2022 Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act.

These are among the most contentious workplace discrimination issues in the private sector. They may also influence the Trump administration’s anti-bias enforcement priorities and predict how its policies will play out in the legal arena.

Below are four major areas for discrimination litigation to watch in 2026:

Religious Bias

Legal factors that enable employers to sidestep religious accommodation requests have become contentious since the Supreme Court’s 2023 Groff v. DeJoy decision, which changed how companies review exemption requests from policies that workers say conflict with their beliefs.

The US Supreme Court may take up the issue soon. The justices recently asked the solicitor general to address if it must review a petition over whether employers can be excused from granting religious accommodations under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to avoid violating state regulations and facing potential penalties.

The high court petition also asked whether state mandates can override Title VII and the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

The hardship issue is largely prominent in suits over vaccine mandates, but the evolving case law will impact accommodation litigation involving grooming, pronoun policies, and anti-bias training.

Groff requires employers to grant reasonable accommodations unless they’d face “substantial increased costs,” rather than just a minor burden, causing undue hardship.

In the Covid-19 context, courts recognized hardship when an exemption would violate state vaccine rules or risk exposure for medically vulnerable patients and staff. Avoiding vaccination with daily testing, which may incur costly operational changes, is among the factors that qualified.

The case is Does v. Hochul, U.S., No. 24-1015.

Hostile Work Environment

The scarcity of circuit precedent addressing when diversity efforts like anti-bias training can create a race-based hostile work environment may soon become a thing of the past as the Tenth, Ninth, and Third circuits are poised to hear legal challenges from White workers.

In these cases, the workers claimed they had to quit their job due to the training’s content, or faced adverse actions after voicing their objections.

Anti-bias training is intended to help employees identify and understand their own unconscious biases, but has faced legal scrutiny amid a surge in DEI-related litigation in recent years, pushing federal courts to determine their legal boundaries.

A handful of recent appellate rulings established that training implemented in a way that stereotypes a racial group or discusses a particular race with a constant drumbeat of negative language can sustain a race-based hostile work environment claim.

These claims, however, must meet a high threshold to show any harassment was “severe or pervasive.” A single training, without evidence of repeated exposure to race-based harassment, is likely insufficient, attorneys said.

The cases are Young v. Colorado Department of Corrections, 10th Cir., No. 25-01068, Diemert v. City of Seattle, 9th Cir., No. 25-1188, and De Piero v. Pennsylvania State University, 3d Cir., No. 25-01952.

Pretext in Job Bias

A judge-made requirement for workers to show that a company’s explanation for taking an adverse job action was a “pretext” for discrimination gained increased attention after Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch called for it to end in a concurrence last term.

Pretext is the final step of the three-part evidentiary test the high court established in 1973’s McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green to evaluate indirect evidence of workplace bias. Its application has since been inconsistent.

Critics argue that pretext lacks a statutory basis under Title VII and undercuts rules governing the summary judgment phase of litigation where a case can get tossed before trial if there’s no factual disputes for a jury to decide.

Eliminating pretext may allow more cases to go to trial since those rules only require plaintiffs to show genuine questions of fact that could lead a reasonable fact-finder to determine discrimination, plaintiff’s attorneys have said.

The Tenth and Fourth circuits have cited the justices to justify relaxing their pretext application in recent cases. There’s a pending petition asking the high court to determine if pretext conflicts with summary judgment rules, and a direct challenge to the McDonnell Douglas framework at the Fifth Circuit.

The cases are Bassett v. Gray Media Group, 5th Cir., No. 25-60278 and Mays v. Newly Weds Foods Inc., U.S., No. 25-499.

#MeToo Law’s Scope

The Ninth and Second circuits may soon determine whether a #MeToo-era law covers broader gender-based mistreatment claims beyond traditional workplace sexual misconduct.

The law allows workers to seek legal recourse in court for sexual harassment or assault claims, rather than being limited to private dispute resolution processes mandated by their employment contracts. Congress didn’t define what constitutes sexual harassment or assault under the EFAA, leaving courts to interpret its scope.

Some courts have maintained a narrow view that the EFAA only applies when plaintiffs at least plausibly allege claims of unwanted sexual advances or comment. As such, non-harassment claims have been sent to arbitration, while the remaining case proceeds in court.

But employers argue the EFAA wasn’t meant to reach non-sexual harassment claims.

Many courts have found that the EFAA covers the whole case if intertwined allegations like unequal pay or generalized gender hostility that fall outside of the law are linked to the underlying sexual misconduct claim.

The cases are Ding v. Structure Therapeutics Inc., 9th Cir., No. 25-1532 and TikTok Inc. v. Puris, 2d Cir., No. 25-322.