How Sausage Packers Proved Sex Discrimination
Sex discrimination can be hard to prove. But a group of women who wanted to be sausage packers proved that they were denied jobs because of their gender. The purpose of this blog entry is to show how sex discrimination can be proved.
There is a sausage packing plant in Fort Madison, Iowa. The packers carry and lift 18,000 pounds of sausage a day. Each pack weighs 35 pounds and it must be lifted 30 to 60 inches high. 46% of the new packers hired were female. But the company noticed that these packers had a high rate of injury and that cost them money - so they created a strength test for new hires. The percentage of females hired dropped from 46%t to 8% after the strength test was used. Only 38% of women passed the test while 97% of men passed. A group of women who were rejected as sausage packers sued and they won. Read more to find out how the women beat the company.
The judge said that the rejected female packers had to prove a pattern of sex discrimination - that sex discrimination was company's standard operating procedure. The judge said they could prove this with statistics combined with anecdotal examples of discrimination. Discriminatory intent can be inferred from the fact that women were treated differently.
Statistical disparities are significant if the expected number of women hired and the actual number of women hired exceeds two or three standard deviations. This is a fancy way of saying that if the difference cannot be explained by chance, then we know it was done on purpose. There is a formula called a "standard deviation" test that figures this out. In our sausage case, the standard deviation was 10 so there is no way that happened by chance.
The women also found experts who said that the test was too hard and it unfairly excluded women. This was enough to prove the case.
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