disparate impact

disparate impact, judicial theory developed in the United States that allows challenges to employment or educational practices that are nondiscriminatory on their face but have a disproportionately negative effect on members of legally protected groups. When the U.S. Supreme Court first recognized the theory, it was hailed as a breakthrough for civil rights. However, civil rights advocates have been disappointed as federal courts have increasingly limited how and when plaintiffs may file disparate-impact claims. As a result, disparate-impact suits have become less successful over time.

Disparate impact theory and Title VII

The theory of disparate impact arose from the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), a case presenting a challenge to a power company’s requirement that employees pass an intelligence test and obtain a high-school diploma to transfer out of its lowest-paying department. Prior to 1965 African Americans could be hired only by the lowest-paying department of the company and were not allowed to transfer out. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—whose Title VII prohibited (among other things) discrimination on the basis of race by employers involved in interstate commerce—the company officially abandoned this restriction and instituted the high-school-diploma and intelligence-test requirements for transfers.

In Griggs the Supreme Court held that Title VII “proscribes not only overt discrimination, but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.” To determine whether an employment practice that causes a disparate impact is proscribed, “the touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude [members of a protected group] cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.” The court found that the two requirements imposed by the company were not related to job performance, noting that many white employees who were not high-school graduates had been performing well in the higher-paying departments. Further, the court thought that the intelligence test, on which African Americans tended not to perform as well as whites, did not bear a demonstrable relationship to any of the jobs for which it was used.

Evolution of disparate impact theory

The first case that significantly limited the disparate impact theory was Washington v. Davis (1976), in which the Supreme Court held that the theory could not be used to establish a constitutional claim—in this case, that an employment practice by the District of Columbia violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment—unless plaintiffs could show that the facially neutral standards were adopted with discriminatory intent. The court reasoned that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “involves a more probing judicial review of, and less deference to, the seemingly reasonable acts of administrators and executives than is appropriate under the Constitution where special racial impact, without discriminatory purpose, is claimed.” In addition, the court expressed its concern that extending the theory of disparate impact to constitutional claims “would raise serious questions about, and perhaps invalidate, a whole range of tax, welfare, public service, regulatory, and licensing statutes that may be more burdensome to the poor and to the average black than to the more affluent white.”

The following year the Supreme Court, in Dothard v. Rawlinson (1977), addressed Title VII’s “bona fide occupational qualification” exception in sex-discrimination cases. Here a class of women challenged a state’s height and weight requirements for prison guards at male correctional facilities. The requirements excluded approximately 40 percent of all women but only 1 percent of men. The court decided that the disparate impact was justifiable, because strength and size constituted bona fide occupational requirements for a job that involved maintaining order in prisons.

In Wards Cove Packing Co., Inc. v. Atonio (1989), the Supreme Court imposed significant limitations on the theory of disparate impact. The court switched the burden of proof to plaintiffs, requiring that they demonstrate that practices by employers that cause disparate impacts are not business necessities. Moreover, the court indicated that plaintiffs also had the burden of identifying which specific business practices generated the disparate impacts and of demonstrating that employers had refused to adopt alternative practices that would have met their needs.

The U.S. Congress responded to Wards Cove in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which provided a partial victory to proponents of the theory of disparate impact. On the one hand, the statute finally codified the theory (as an amendment to Title VII) and essentially superseded the court’s holding that plaintiffs had to prove that a practice causing a disparate impact was not a business necessity. On the other hand, the act generally required plaintiffs to identify with specificity the challenged business practices. Unfortunately, however, the act failed to clarify how the existence of disparate impacts was to be established, under what circumstances an employer’s practice counted as a business necessity, and what plaintiffs needed to show regarding alternative practices with lesser disparate impacts. Some clarity was subsequently provided by the Supreme Court’s decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. (2015), which endorsed an interpretation of the Fair Housing Act that had permitted disparate-impact challenges to allegedly discriminatory housing policies or practices but also articulated new limits on the scope of such actions, including that “housing authorities and private developers [must be given] leeway to state and explain the valid interest served by their policies” and that “a disparate-impact claim that relies on a statistical disparity must fail if the plaintiff cannot point to a defendant’s policy or policies causing that disparity.”

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Application beyond Title VII

The judiciary has applied the theory of disparate impact beyond Title VII to a variety of other federal nondiscrimination statute titles and laws. For example, in the case of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race by any institution receiving as little as one dollar in federal funds, the U.S. Department of Education promulgated Title VI regulations that prohibit “criteria or methods of administration which have the effect of subjecting individuals to discrimination because of their race, color, or national origin.” Disparate-impact analysis also has been incorporated into regulations issued by federal agencies to implement Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a sister statute of Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any program or activity at educational institutions that receive federal funds.

Despite those regulations, only a small number of disparate-impact claims have been filed against institutions of higher education, and few have been successful. In one notable case, a federal district court upheld a university’s requirement that applicants hold a doctoral degree in order to obtain positions as assistant professors, even though the requirement had a disparate impact on African Americans. In another case, Cureton v. National Collegiate Athletic Association (1999), the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that a bylaw of the NCAA that required prospective student athletes to achieve a score of at least 820 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in order to receive athletic scholarships and financial aid could not be challenged on disparate-impact grounds (as a violation of Title VI), because the single program for which the NCAA received federal funding was unrelated to athletic scholarships and financial aid.

Disability laws also prohibit disparate impacts. Even so, plaintiffs have rarely prevailed, because the accommodation process examines each person individually, while the theory of disparate impact is designed to look at the effects on a group. Nevertheless, in Alexander v. Choate (1985), the Supreme Court assumed that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 “reaches at least some conduct that has an unjustifiable disparate impact upon the handicapped.” A similar statute, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), prohibits the use of “standards, criteria, or methods of administration that have the effect of discrimination on the basis of disability.”

Antidiscrimination statutes, including Title VI and Title IX, can be enforced administratively when federal agencies threaten to deny federal funds to institutions for noncompliance. Yet in Alexander v. Sandoval (2001), the Supreme Court closed the door on disparate-impact suits brought by individuals under Title VI, ruling that although the agency’s regulations were valid, no private right of action existed for individuals to enforce them. Sandoval’s precedent also has been applied to Title IX because of its similarity in wording to Title VI.

The Supreme Court determined that disparate-impact claims can be brought under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), but it imposed significant limitations on those suits. In Smith v. City of Jackson (2005), for example, the court held that when age is an issue in personnel actions, employers need to demonstrate not the existence of business necessities but only that disparate impacts were caused by a “reasonable factor other than age,” the less-demanding standard allowed by the ADEA.