Employment Quotas for Women

In Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. American Telephone and Telegraph Company (1977), a federal appeals court upheld the constitutionality of race and genderconscious employment quotas in a much-publicized consent decree. Although no party had addressed whether affirmative action remedies that may be legal for minorities would necessarily also be legal for women, the court gave the issue passing attention. After briefly discussing the constitutional principles whereby gender classification are subject to a lower standard of judicial scrutiny than are racial classifications, the court concluded: “The present classifications are permissible in the case of race, and are thus permissible a fortiori with respect to sex.” This has been the only court decision to touch upon a possible difference in the constitutional analyses of employment quotas for minorities and those for women. The court’s view that quotas for women were subject to less