The Shifting Sands of Employment Discrimination: From Unjustified Impact to Disparate Treatment in Pregnancy and Pay

Abstract

In 2015, the Supreme Court decided its first major pregnancy discrimination case in nearly a quarter century. The Court’s decision in Young v. United Parcel Service, Inc., made a startling move: despite over four decades of Supreme Court case law roping off disparate treatment and disparate impact into discrete and separate categories, the Court crafted a pregnancy discrimination claim that permits an unjustified impact on pregnant workers to support the inference of discriminatory intent necessary to prevail on a disparate treatment claim. The decision cuts against the grain of established employment discrimination law by blurring the impact/treatment boundary and relaxing the strictness of the similarity required between comparators in order to establish discriminatory intent. This article situates the newly-minted pregnancy discrimination claim in Young against the backdrop of employment discrimination law generally and argues that the Court’s hybrid treatment-by-impact claim is in good company with other outlier cases in which courts blur the boundaries of the impact/treatment line. The article defends the use of unjustified impact to prove pregnancy discrimination as well-designed to reach the kind of implicit bias against pregnant workers that often underlies employer refusals to extend accommodations to pregnant workers. While Young is not likely to prompt an earthquake in employment discrimination doctrine, this article identifies and defends a parallel development in the law governing pay discrimination that similarly incorporates unjustified impact into a disparate treatment framework. This move has already begun in some lower courts and is a central feature of the primary focal point of legislative reform, the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act. As is the case with pregnancy discrimination, pay discrimination largely stems from implicit judgments devaluing women as workers rather than conscious decisions to disfavor women because of their sex. Importing the Young theory of unjustified impact into the pay claim is necessary to make it a more viable tool for reaching the kind of bias that manifests as pay discrimination in the modern workforce. The insights developed in this article from exploring the theory and doctrine in Young provide support for the parallel development that is on the cusp of taking hold in the equal pay claim. The article concludes with some thoughts about why, given the malleability in fact, if not in judicial rhetoric, of the treatment and impact categories, disparate treatment provides the preferable grounding for these developments. Doctrinal advantages aside, the disparate treatment framing of pregnancy and pay discrimination claims best resonates with the social movement work of contesting the gender ideologies at the heart of these injustices.

Keywords: Employment Discrimination, Disparate Treatment, Disparate Impact, Pregnancy Discrimination, Pay Discrimination, Equal Pay

JEL Classification: J71