Okay, so I keep lucking out and my dog keeps barking between segments. So hopefully we can pull out like two more segments and no barking. Okay, so legal issues in industrial psychology. Let's sort of go through the history of industrial psychology and some issues having to do with legalities.
Before the 1960s, there really were no laws about employment discrimination. Sort of a... laissez-faire attitude towards employment.
You were employed at will and you could quit at will and your employer could fire you for whatever reason they felt like firing you or choosing not to hire you for whatever reason. In 1964, there was a sudden sea change in the attitude towards the rights of the employer and the rights of the employee. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which was designed to provide equality in employment.
the workforce for people based on a lot of different variables. In 1978, and we'll talk about those variables in a second, in 1978 the EEOC published the uniform guidelines on employee selection processes, or procedures, that became sort of the bible for how selection can be conducted. EEOC is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
So they are the federal bureaucracy that's charged with making sure that employers are following the law that was set forth by the Civil Rights Act. In 1987, SIOP, which if you recall is the IO Psychology Group, published the Principles for the Validation and Use of Personnel Selection Procedures. So, you know, roughly 10 years after the EEOC's publication, the, you know, SIOP came out with their strategies for how to validate.
and correctly use personnel selection procedures to put more of a research bent on. It's not just about fairness. It's also about doing it correctly.
And then in 2003, SIOP revised these principles to keep up with changes in the law and things like that. And changes in instrumentation and other kinds of things that have changed in the field, how we actually collect data and process data and stuff like that. Okay.
Now, a term I just used in that discussion was the employment at will issue. What that means is that employers and employees have the right to initiate and terminate the employment relationship at any time for any reason or really for no reason at all. I mean, an employee can quit anytime they want.
I think we can all agree that that makes sense. Otherwise, you're a little bit trapped. There are certain exceptions. If you're under contract.
and you've made a legally binding commitment to stick out this job, you obviously can't quit at any time for no reason. But for the most part, an employee who's dissatisfied with their job can leave. An employer who's dissatisfied with a worker can dismiss them at any time.
And that's called at-will employment. Recently... there have been a lot of what we call wrongful discharge claims that have really started to change what it means to be employed at will. It has started to become dicey if you are any member of a protected class for an employer to be able to fire you at will without potentially facing a wrongful discharge claim that maybe you didn't lose your job because of performance, but because of some kind of...
bias or discrimination. There are certain exceptions to this at-will thing that, like I said, employment contracts are a really good example. You can't just up and leave when you're under contract. In case you've ever wondered about, like, LeBron James just had his employment contract run out with the Miami Heat.
Believe me, I don't know about basketball. I just watched the news. And so his contract ran out and he had the opportunity to go to another team.
He did not have that opportunity last year because he had a contract and he had to play out his contract. If you've ever seen Jerry Maguire, there's a whole discussion about having to stay here and play out the rest of your contract. Anyway, there are also at-will exceptions where there are certain companies that have Just Cause.
discharge policies and that's usually a two-way street. I'm sorry a one-way street where the employer has to show just cause for why they are going to discharge an employee. The employee still has the freedom to leave at any time, but the employer if they want to discharge employees in certain circumstances they have to show that the employee has done something wrong to warrant discharge.
So there are a couple of exceptions, but for most of the For most of us, the jobs that we have are at will. We can expect that if our performance is not up to par, that our employer could fire us. And if we want to leave, we can leave. Adverse impact is the common operationalization of discrimination according to the courts. So when we talk about adverse impact, we're talking about how the courts have interpreted discrimination.
Those of you who have had psychology classes and learned about operational definitions, this is how the courts have operationally defined discrimination as it applies to employment law. They've developed basic guidelines for what constitutes discrimination, and they've called it the 80% rule. What we're talking about here is that if you have a group, Let's just say women since more than half of us fall in that category. It's easy to use them as a group So let's say you've got women who are applying for jobs as Something traditionally male.
Let's say firefighter. Okay, so if you've got A bunch of you know, let's say some number of women apply for the opening at the local firehouse 10 women. Let's make the math easy. And then you've got, let's say, 100 men turn out for the same job.
I'm just trying to keep the math so I don't blow it while I'm talking off the cuff. So we got 10 women and 100 men applying for the one position at the firehouse. Okay. Now let's say that in the existing...
pool of firemen and women at this firehouse, we've got, I have no idea how many firemen work at a firehouse, so don't judge me, but let's say we've got 20 men and one woman working at the firehouse right now. If a woman who is applying for the job doesn't get the job and she wants to bring suit against the firehouse, she has to show that the selection rate for her group is less than 80% of the selection rate for the highest selection rate group, which would be men. So she would be able to say, well, there's only one woman and 20 men.
That is much less than the 80% rule. I'm going to try and argue that there's discrimination against women at the firehouse. Okay.
I think I managed to keep all the numbers right. The thing is, Presence of adverse impact alone does not necessarily indicate illegal discrimination. I use the firehouse very specifically because it's one of those cases where there may be a reason why there's only one woman and 20 men there, that there are selection criteria and things that they go through that the job needs as cutoffs. You know, you need to be able to do these certain skills and that more men are able to do those things than women are.
And so. Just because there's only one woman and 20 men does not necessarily mean that there's illegal discrimination going on. So what happens if you want to bring a discrimination suit? You're one of those 10 women who tried out for the opening and didn't get hired.
You want to make a discrimination case. First off, you have to demonstrate what's called a prima facie case. What that means is that you've got the numbers to show that there's adverse impact. So I think we've met that criteria with my little example, because the numbers show that there's way more men than there are women. Okay.
Now the organization might be able to argue against the statistics and say, well, you've interpreted it incorrectly. You haven't taken into consideration various other numbers or something like that. That's really not going to work in the example I gave because I don't think you can really argue against.
one woman and 20 men in the firehouse, right? So probably we're not going to be able to make the case that, well, the employee is only looking at partial data or they're interpreting it correctly or they didn't look at the data that's the most relevant or whatever. Instead, they're going to have to admit, okay, yes, there is adverse impact.
Yes, there are more men than women at the firehouse. But they might invoke business necessity defense. They might say it's really super important that the selection battery is job related.
And it doesn't matter whether you belong to the minority group or the majority group. You have to be able to do these tasks to be in this job. If this is the... strategy that the organization is going to take, which I think the firehouse is probably going to do that, the burden of proof is going to shift back to the employee to prove that the organization doesn't really need these skills to be met, but that they're doing it to weed out on purpose the minority group. So initially the employee has to demonstrate that there is AI, and then the company, the organization, has a couple of ways to defend themselves.
Sometimes the organization can very... very reasonably argue against the statistics and say, you're reading this wrong. You're not taking everything into consideration correctly.
But a lot of times they have to say, yeah, there's AI. But we need that, you know, we need these sorting tools. These things are important skills. And it just so happens that one sex tends to have to have the skills set more or whatever the majority group is. And then it becomes the employee's job to say, no, you're doing it.
to eliminate the minority group. Okay, so affirmative action plans, AAPs. Okay, AAPs are an organizational strategy to increase the number of minority or protected class members in their organization, where they are taking the strategy to try and figure out a way to get more people of various backgrounds or group membership into their organization. Usually, the goal of this is to remedy the fact that maybe in the past they have used discriminatory practices in their hiring, or they've used selection criteria that have inordinately favored one group over another, and they're trying to remedy that.
It's not necessarily... It's hardly ever because they say, okay, well, let's see. I want to make sure that I have, that my company matches the percentages of different groups in the population.
So I have to have 51% of my employees be female and 49% male, because that's the ratio in the adult population. Or, you know, 12% black, 14% Hispanic, 4% Asian, and the rest can be white. That's not their intention with these AAPs.
They're... trying to instead remedy what might have been discriminatory practices in the past. Of course, even saying that, you know, trying to qualify it like I did, you know, this process can be pretty controversial where, you know, people can complain that instead of hiring people on the basis of selection criteria that are objective and job related, you may be hiring people based on other factors and favoring one group over another. Most of the research in IO psychology has been focusing on the stigmatization that goes along with affirmative action, the perceptions of justice that can go along with the implementation of AAPs, and then the AAPs in and of themselves, like how are they structured, what is their goal, what are they remedying exactly, things like that. So in IO psych, the researchers have been really interested in trying to figure out sort of...
What are the implications of, if you implement AAPs, what exactly does that do to that class that you're trying to help out and remedy the past wrongs? What does that do to people's feelings of fairness, justice, competitiveness, and those kinds of things? And how exactly are you establishing those AAPs? Apologize for that.
I'm home alone, which makes them bark. Okay, so some recent court cases involving AAPs that are kind of relevant and important are, first off, Gratz versus Bollinger. This was at the University of Michigan in 2003. The university was sued by two Caucasian males who argued that they were denied admission because preference was shown to underrepresented minorities.
And what they were arguing about is that the university gave 20 extra points to applicants for being minorities. And so the intention of the university was to equal the playing field. sort of under the assumption that a minority would need a boost relative to a majority member, the Supreme Court ruled that this kind of global points, saying that just because you belong to a certain class, you get extra points, ignores individual differences, ignores qualifications, and therefore is discriminatory. So the Supreme Court ruled against the university and said that they can't be applying that kind of AAP to an entire group like that.
The University of Michigan Law School also got sued in 2003 by a Caucasian female who said that she was also denied admission due to racial preferences. The Supreme Court in this case ruled that while diversity is a compelling interest for the law school, the thing that the law school did differently from the university in general was that they um considered the elements of diversity on an individual basis. So rather than just a global everybody who's of a minority background gets 20 points, they did it based on individual elements. And it wasn't the defining feature of the decision in admitting or not admitting an applicant.
And so in the law school case, the court ruled in the university's favor. In Pettit v. Chicago, which was a lawsuit against the police, the court ruled that there is a compelling need for diversity in a large metropolitan police force. Because they're working with a racially diverse population, it's important to make sure that the police force represents the people that they are patrolling and things.
And so in this case, the court said that it was okay to consider racial criteria in... the hiring practices because it's important to establish diversity. In parents versus the Seattle school district, hey, a local one, the court determined that diversity is a compelling governmental interest and it would be illegal to have an AAP based solely on race without considering any individual differences.
So you can't do that. But if you have evaluations that include race. as one variable while still giving greater weight to the individual differences that that would be okay. My final example is Fisher versus the University of Texas. And in this case, the court supported narrowly tailored AAPs.
As the university was striving to increase diversity in the undergraduate programs, the court said that as long as you are Taking individual differences and skill sets and qualifications into account as your major factor, you know, having a goal of achieving diversity is not necessarily discriminatory. So AAPs get looked at based on how, you know, get judged as legal or illegal, as discriminatory or not, based on how they're being applied. And the mistake the University of Michigan made was just making this global... And this was not that uncommon back in 2003 for universities to have sort of a global, you get extra credit for belonging to certain groups kind of thing.
Most universities have gotten rid of that now because, you know, a global application of points is actually discriminatory. Okay, I think I'm going to stop here and start another segment with the major U.S. legislation yes let's do that we'll come back in the next segment talk about this okay