From: IN%"ichudov@algebra.com" 11-DEC-1996 23:46:57.12
I would appreciate if some attorney on this list shed some light on the legal definition of discrimination.
I am not an attorney by any means, but I have looked over the Griggs vs Power decision (which effectively outlawed the use of most standardized tests, such as IQ tests, for employment purposes). A means of deciding on employment is discriminatory if the following are both true: A. Under it, members of a protected minority do worse; B. It has not been shown to be _specifically_ relevant to a job. Please note the second one; this means, effectively, that if you haven't done a full study of people who have done the job and correlated their performance with their scores on the test, it may be discriminatory. You can't use the simple information that an IQ test score is correlated with essentially all job performance measures yet done on any jobs not intended for the mentally retarded. Obviously, this task can't be done by anyone but the largest employers, and they are generally hindered in doing so by: A. Being governments or government contractors, and thus susceptible to political pressure; B. Having unions which object to any job performance measures. I'd appreciate any lawyerly comments that contradict me, particularly in view of some later (and saner) Supreme Court rulings on the matter. -Allen P.S. Please note that we cannot yet tell if the racial differences in IQ are environmental or a mixture of environmental and genetic; I believe they are purely environmental, but there is about as much evidence for this belief as there is for God's existence (something I also believe in).