The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person's race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, national origin, age (40 or older), disability, or genetic information. Figure 13.12 provides some of the legal language from laws that have been passed to prevent discrimination.
The United States has several specific laws regarding fairness and avoidance of discrimination. The Equal Pay Act requires equal pay for men and women in the same workplace who are performing equal work. Despite the law, persistent inequities in earnings between men and women exist. Corbett & Hill (2012) studied one facet of the gender gap by looking at earnings in the first year after college in the United States. Just comparing the earnings of women to men, women earn about 82 cents for every dollar a man earns in their first year out of college. However, some of this difference can be explained by education, career, and life choices, such as choosing majors with lower earning potential or specific jobs within a field that have less responsibility. When these factors were corrected the study found an unexplained seven-cents-on-the-dollar gap in the first year after college that can be attributed to gender discrimination in pay. This approach to analysis of the gender pay gap, called the human capital model, has been criticized. Lips (2013) argues that the education, career, and life choices can, in fact, be constrained by necessities imposed by gender discrimination. This suggests that removing these factors entirely from the gender gap equation leads to an estimate of the size of the pay gap that is too small.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal to treat individuals unfavorably because of their race or color of their skin: An employer cannot discriminate based on skin color, hair texture, or other immutable characteristics, which are traits of an individual that are fundamental to their identity, in hiring, benefits, promotions, or termination of employees. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 amends the Civil Rights Act; it prohibits job (e.g., employment, pay, and termination) discrimination of a woman because she is pregnant as long as she can perform the work required.
The Supreme Court ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. made it illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to include educational requirements in a job description (e.g., high school diploma) that negatively impacts one race over another if the requirement cannot be shown to be directly related to job performance. The EEOC (2014) received more than 94,000 charges of various kinds of employment discrimination in 2013. Many of the filings are for multiple forms of discrimination and include charges of retaliation for making a claim, which itself is illegal. Only a small fraction of these claims become suits filed in a federal court, although the suits may represent the claims of more than one person. In 2013, there were 148 suits filed in federal courts.
Link to Learning
In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a case in which women plaintiffs were attempting to group together in a class-action suit against Walmart for gender discrimination in promotion and pay. The case was important because it was the only practical way for individual women who felt they had been discriminated against to sustain a court battle for redress of their claims. The Court ultimately decided against the plaintiffs, and the right to a class-action suit was denied. However, the case itself effectively publicized the issue of gender discrimination in employment. Watch this video about the case history and issues and this PBS NewsHour video about the arguments to learn more.
Based on a 2020 Supreme Court ruling regarding the application of the Civil Rights Act, federal legislation now protects employees in the private sector from discrimination related to sexual orientation and gender identity. These groups include lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. There is evidence of discrimination derived from surveys of workers, studies of complaint filings, wage comparison studies, and controlled job-interview studies (Badgett, Sears, Lau, & Ho, 2009). Prior to the ruling, federal legislation protected federal employees from such discrimination; the District of Columbia and 20 states have laws protecting public and private employees from discrimination for sexual orientation (American Civil Liberties Union, n.d). Most of the states with these laws also protect against discrimination based on gender identity. Gender identity refers to one’s sense of being male, female, neither of these, both of these, or another gender.
While the Supreme Court's Civil Rights Act interpretation is regarded as a landmark outcome for LGBTQ people, it will be continually tested by organizations that for various reasons see a need to exclude LGBTQ people from employment or service. The First Amendment protects religious organizations from some aspects of anti-discrimination laws, and some recent court decisions have expanded these exceptions so that certain ministries, schools, or other organizations could avoid employing or serving LGBTQ people.
The content of this course has been taken from the free Psychology textbook by Openstax