"In the 1950s, Duke Power's Dan River Steam Station in North Carolina had a policy restricting black employees to its "Labor" department, where the highest-paying position paid less than the lowest-paying position in the four other departments. In 1955, the company added the requirement of a high school diploma for employment in any department other than Labor, and offered to pay two-thirds of the high-school training tuition for employees without a diploma.
On July 2, 1965,
the day the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took effect, Duke Power added two employment tests, which would allow employees without high-school diplomas to transfer to higher-paying departments. These two tests were the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test, a test of mechanical aptitude, and the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test, an IQ test created in 1939.
Whites were almost ten times more likely than blacks to meet these new employment and transfer requirements. According to the 1960 United States census, while 34% of white males in North Carolina had high-school diplomas, only 18% of blacks did. The disparities of aptitude tests were far greater; with the cutoffs set at the median for high-school graduates, 58% of whites passed, compared to 6% of blacks."
"The Supreme Court ruled that under
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, if such tests disparately impact ethnic minority groups, businesses must demonstrate that such tests are "reasonably related" to the job for which the test is required. Because Title VII was passed pursuant to Congress's power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, the disparate impact test later articulated by the Supreme Court in
Washington v. Davis, 426 US 229 (1976) is inapplicable. (The
Washington v. Davis test for disparate impact is used in constitutional equal protection clause cases, while Title VII's prohibition on disparate impact is a statutory mandate.)
As such, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment tests (when used as a decisive factor in employment decisions) that are not a "reasonable measure of job performance," regardless of the absence of actual intent to discriminate. Since the aptitude tests involved, and the high school diploma requirement, were broad-based and not directly related to the jobs performed, Duke Power's employee transfer procedure was found by the Court to be in violation of the Act."
Ruling seems reasonable to me. The company issued this requirement the same day the Civil Rights Act was to begin enforcement, red flags should be going off that some discrimination is about to be occurring/continuing. Nothing in this ruling speaks to DEI to me. I don't even know if this ruling hasn't been overturned in the mean time.