Sex-Based Wage Discrimination under the Title VII Disparate Impact Doctrine

Comparable Worth Theory of Title VII Sex Discrimination in Compensation

Title VII disparate impact suits against state governments after Hibbs and Lane.

The disparate impact theory of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 enables employees and job applicants to challenge employment practices that, although neutral on their face, have a disproportionate, adverse effect on the basis of race, sex, or national origin. It permits challenges to a wide variety of employment practices—including standardized tests, diploma requirements, height and w...

The War between Disparate Impact and Equal Protection

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids job discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.1 Title VII was originally enacted as a regulation of interstate commerce and applied only to private employers. In 1972, however, the Act was extended to the public sector pursuant to Congress’s Fourteenth Amendment authority to ensure that ‘‘[n]o State shall . . . deny ...

Education and Wage-Based Statistical Discrimination

This study examines the role of statistical discrimination in determining workers’ wages. Employers initially have an imperfect knowledge of their employees’ true productivity and so may “statistically discriminate” in setting wages, using observed correlates of productivity to estimate its true value. For both holders of bachelors’ degrees and MBA graduates, I use the traditional EL-SD test to...

Wage discrimination and partial compliance with the minimum wage law

This paper presents a simple model to characterize the discriminatory behavior of a non-complying firm in a minimum-wage economy. In the analysis, the violating firm pays one “favored” group of workers the statutory minimum and the other “non-favored” group of workers a sub-minimum. We find conditions under which law enforcement is ineffective in improving the between-group wage differentials. ...