What does “disparate impact” mean?
Disparate impact is another, and less common, way to prove discrimination. In these types of cases, the employer or management may enact a policy or regulation that is, on its face, non-discriminatory. In application, however, the rule may be found to have a disparate impact on a particular protected group of federal employees. A common example is an older hiring practice of refusing employment to applicants that have been only arrested. On its face, this doesn’t seem to be a problem, but it has been held that in certain cities and in certain industries, such a policy can effectively result in excluding some ethnic groups from the federal workplace. Disparate impact is proven, primarily, through statistical analysis of the groups that are and are not impacted.
