Protected classes include; race, color, creed or religion, national origin, sex, age, and disability. Many people fall into more than one protected category.
An adverse employment action is anything the employer does which affects the employee's job and is negative. This can be just about anything relating to someone's job. It includes an employee's terms or conditions of employment, position, pay, title, work hours, vacations etc. Whether or not a person is hired is also considered a term or condition of employment.
The Employer's Position:.
The next step is to determine the employer's position. The employer should describe what legitimate reason exists for the cause of action taken. For example, let us take a case of a woman who was fired, and says it is because she is a woman; because her manager hates women. The employer might state that the employee was not fired because she was a woman, but because the employer was actually downsizing. That is a perfectly legal reason to fire someone. Just because the person is a female does not mean that you can never fire her; it just means that you can never fire her because she is a woman. In this case the employer says it was not because she was a woman but because the company was downsizing.
The burden of proof is on the employee to show that the employer's actions were illegal. In this example, the employee might be able to show that her position was not eliminated. For example, if the same week she was fired, the employer hired someone to replace her, there clearly was not a downsizing going on.
In this example, once the employee showed that the employer was not downsizing, but had actually hired a new person, the presumption was that the employer had discriminated. In the past, once the employee proved that the employer's supposed reason was not actually the legitimate reason, and then the court would presume that the real reason was the illegal one.