Employment Discrimination: Statistics Generally

Statistics Use in Employment Discrimination Generally

• Both Plaintiffs and Defendants use statistics
  
• Need a large enough sample size
  
• Essential for some kinds of cases
• Class actions
• "Pattern and Practice" cases (brought by the gov't)--like class actions (used to be more important than they are today)
• Really important for HR purposes--otherwise how does HR find out if discrimination is happening in their company?
  
• But numbers can be manipulated by managers, etc.--IMPORTANT FOR HR to structure reports to avoid having dept hide details from them
  
• In litigation
• Basis of discovery disputes
  
• Fights about whether statistics are good enough to be admissible--court as a gatekeeper
  
• Experts also important--must have them on the one hand to explain the stats, on the other hand experts know nothing about Title VII or your widgets--can create completely useless stats b/c they do not understand what question to ask!
  
• General Advice: in assessing statistics, you must understand them yourself, cannot simply rely on "experts," especially when deciding what statistical analysis to conduct