Maggie's Farm

Gabriel Malor has a good write-up on this:

"Under Title VII, New Haven was prohibited from intentional acts of employment discrimination based on race. This is called disparate treatment. Title VII also prohibits policies or practices that are not intended to discriminate but in fact have a disproportionately adverse effect on minorities. This is called disparate impact. Disparate impact is often demonstrated with statistical analyses.

"The facts of this case set the two types of prohibited conduct against each other. New Haven could either intentionally discriminate against the successful white and Hispanic candidates or its firefighter promotion policy (based on the test results) would have a disproportinately adverse impact on black candidates."

I get why we would have the second test, the "disparate impact" test, because it can be so hard to demonstrate intent directly. But it strikes me that, when these two tests collide, it's pretty obvious we should say: When you devise a remedy for disparate impact, find a way to do it that doesn't blatantly require intentional discrimination on the basis of race.

How hard is this? If a written test really isn't tailored to the actual job requirements but sneaks in a lot of irrelevant stuff that white men are supposedly better at, it should be possible to demonstrate that directly.

Quotas stink.