Skip to main content
  • About Us
  • Careers
  • Contact

Search form

American Institutes for Research

  • Our Work
    • Education
    • Health
    • International
    • Workforce
    • ALL TOPICS >
  • Our Services
    • Research and Evaluation
    • Technical Assistance
  • Our Experts
  • News & Events

You are here

  • Home
15 Jun 1991
Report

Identifying Similarly Situated Employees in Employment Discrimination Cases

From the Jurimetrics Journal of Law, Science and Technology

The intent of most employment equity analyses is to determine what the treatment of a protected group of employees would have been in the absence of discrimination. To be valid, those analyses have to take into account any legally relevant differences between the protected employees and a comparison group of employees (e.g., all of the other employees, white employees, males, or white males). The analyst can take into account differences in qualifications, productivity, and other circumstances either by using methods that statistically control for such variables (such as logistic regression analysis) or by identifying pools of similarly situated employees with minimal average differences between the protected and nonprotected employees within each pool.

In order to increase accuracy and validity, pools can be based on: (a) the current composition of the work force; (b) the composition of the work force annually during the relevant period; (c) even more frequent snapshots of the composition of the work force; or (d) the specific circumstances of each selection event and the particular employees who met those criteria on that selection day. Pools that are specifically tailored to each selection event are derived from an employee history file by using a computer program that passes through the file and identifies everyone who met the relevant criteria on the date of the selection event. For a few dozen selection events, the computer code defining each pool can be written by hand, but for hundreds or thousands of selection events, one needs a preceding computer program that will produce the computer code that passes through the employee history file.

The advantage of identifying pools of similarly situated persons is that the analyses to detect the effects of employment discrimination can then be simple to perform and simple to explain to the court (although multivariate analysis methods may be more powerful when the qualifications are continuous variables). As with any analysis that is performed many times for subsets of the work force, the results from separate pools need to be aggregated properly to determine whether there is a pattern and practice of employment discrimination that is not detectable in the individual analyses.
 

PDF icon Identifying Similarly Situated Employees in Employment Discrimination Cases

Further Reading

  • Content and Technical Expertise in Refugee and Migrant Initiatives
  • AIR Research Fuels “Launch My Career,” a New Website to Help Students Envision Return on Investment for Higher Education Choices
  • Refugee and Migrant Initiatives
  • Moving Forward, Looking Back: Landmark Legislation for Americans with Disabilities
  • Applying Social Science in the Real World
Share

Topic

Human Capital

RESEARCH. EVALUATION. APPLICATION. IMPACT.

About Us

About AIR
Board of Directors
Leadership
Experts
Clients
Contracting with AIR
Contact Us

Our Work

Education
Health
International
Workforce

Client Services

Research and Evaluation
Technical Assistance

News & Events

Careers at AIR


Search form


 

Connecting

FacebookTwitterLinkedinYouTubeInstagram

American Institutes for Research

1400 Crystal Drive, 10th Floor
Arlington, VA 22202-3289
Call: (202) 403-5000
Fax: (202) 403-5000

Copyright © 2021 American Institutes for Research®.  All rights reserved.

  • Privacy Policy
  • Sitemap