Dial To Pay $3M for Strength Test with Disparate Impact on Women

Flex up ladies! You got to carry your weight if you want to work here.

Not so fast! A common sense approach to using a physical test that simulates a job activity for purposes of screening applicants for a manual position may well be shot down for having a disparate impact on women, as the Dial Corporation recently learned the hard way:

A federal judge has ordered the Dial Corporation to pay more than $3 million to resolve a sex discrimination suit alleging the company’s Armour StarMeat Packing plant in Fort Madison, Iowa, discriminated against women by rejecting them for entry-level production jobs because they had failed a strength test. . . .

Chief Judge Ronald E. Longstaff of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa entered a judgment providing that 52 women will be offered jobs at Dial and will share approximately $3,390,000.

The EEOCs lawsuit, filed in September 2002, claimed that Dial’s use of a strength test, which required the repeated lifting of 35 pounds to a height of 65 inches, discriminated against women, since, according to the agency, only approximately 40 percent of female applicants passed the test, while virtually all male applicants passed the test.

Dial claimed that the test was necessary in order to reduce injuries, but Judge Longstaff disagreed with the company’s argument that business necessity justified the test.

“Judge Says Dial Must Pay $3M in Bias Suit Over Strength Test” (HR.BLR.com)

Read two EEOC press releases on the case.

Remember, it was not the disparate impact alone that doomed this hiring test, but the failure, once the impact was established, to prove the test satisfied the business necessity standard: “Dial has failed to fulfill its burden to show it had a ‘compelling need’ for implementation . . . , and that other, non-discriminatory mechanisms . . . could not produce the same results.”

Now look at the relationship between the job and the test.

“The job is physically demanding, requiring the repetitive lifting of a 35-pound rod of sausages to a height of approximately 65 inches.”

The test required the repeated lifting of 35 pounds to a height of 65 inches.

Hmm . . . sounds fair enough, right?

But “only approximately 40% of female applicants passed the test, while virtually all male applicants passed the test, although women had successfully performed the jobs in the sausage making department before the test was implemented.”

Now, George, what’s the lesson here? Never use a strength test? Maybe so. But it’s sure fishy that the test results and actual job performance were so far off. So I’d say — and suspect Michael the test-validation expert would agree — that the lesson is if you use one, you’d better validate carefully against actual employee performance, no matter how much the test appears to mimic the job.

Photo credit: seanich via flickr

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