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Workplace discrimination is a social problem in American society caused by a complex history of slavery and open racism. The legislature and judiciary must pay close attention to unfair actions towards people with certain so-called sensitive attributes. It can be race, gender, sexual orientation, color, religion, disability, and so forth. Discriminatory practices can be divided into two categories: disparate treatment and disparate impact. The similarities and differences between these concepts, based on the presence or absence of intentionality, will be shown in the case of Griggs v Duke Power Co., decided in 1971.
In general, disparate treatment means some intentional discriminatory actions and policies, while disparate impact refers to unintentional discrimination. Disparate treatment happens when “the decisions an individual user receives change with changes to her sensitive attribute information” (Zafar et al., 2017, p. 1171). In other words, employers create a specific recruiting policy that is sure to influence the selection of favorable candidates, regardless of the skills required for a particular job. In contrast, disparate impact occurs unintentionally, so the employers have no aim to restrict certain minorities. For example, some tasks may disproportionally favor people of one group, although these tasks test abilities of job performance (Zafar et al., 2017). Judges who deal with cases of discrimination in the workplace sometimes have to decide on very difficult and controversial actions when it is not clear whether the employer’s actions were intentional or not.
With regard to Griggs v Duke Power Co., this court decision involves discrimination against African Americans in North Carolina. In 1955, Duke Power added a requirement to have a high school diploma if an employee wanted to promote to a more prestigious department (Griggs v Duke Power Co., 1971). Historically, African Americans had much smaller opportunities to get a high school diploma than White people. Then, after the 1964 Civil Rights Act took effect, Duke Power Company had to change its policies because the requirement of a diploma restricted people to compete for job positions from the very beginning. However, the company introduced a test that was highly similar to the IQ test (Griggs v Duke Power Co., 1971). After that, African Americans sued the company for unfair treatment and won this dispute, since the court considered such a test unreasonable.
This case is a clear example of disparate impact because at that time employers may not know that some minorities have significant difficulties in accomplishing such kinds of IQ tests. Initially, when the company required to have a high school diploma for promotion, it was desperate treatment. Nevertheless, the court ruling indicates that “while the Company previously followed a policy of overt racial discrimination in a period prior to the Act, such conduct had ceased” (Griggs v Duke Power Co., 1971). After the adjustments in the company’s policies, Duke Power transferred from disparate treatment to disparate impact. Since there were no court rulings on the discriminatory nature of IQ tests, employers could unwittingly consider such a procedure to be fair.
To sum up, the key difference between disparate treatment and disparate impact is the difference in intentionality. Disparate treatment happens when employers know that their approach to recruiting favors some groups over another, while disparate impact relates to unintentional discrimination. The analysis of Griggs v Duke Power Co. brought the conclusion that both categories are discriminatory, so judicial and legislative power should take decisive actions to promote social equity in the workplace.
References
Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (U.S. Sup. Ct. 1971).
Zafar, M. B., Valera, I., Gomez Rodriguez, M., & Gummadi, K. P. (2017). Fairness beyond disparate treatment & disparate impact: Learning classification without disparate mistreatment.Proceedings of the 26th international conference on world wide web (pp. 1171-1180).
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