Contesting Workplace Discrimination in Court - American Bar ...

TYPE-ISSUE COMBINATIONSAn important question in EDL cases is whether discrimination based on particular employee characteristics tends to align withparticular issue claims. For example, is unlawful firing more of a problem in race, as opposed to sex or age cases? Are claims ofdiscriminatory promotion more prevalent in sex cases than in disability cases? Although formal tests of statistical significance arenecessary to answer such questions, the data nonetheless reveal—in a general sense—substantial uniformity in the breakdownof cases by type and issue. With just two exceptions, race, sex, age, disability, and national origin cases follow a strikingly similarpattern in the proportion of issue claims: unlawful firing is the most prevalent, followed (in order) by claims of discriminatoryretaliation, promotion, pay, and hiring. Figure 2.8 shows that the one major exception to this pattern is sex cases, in which theproportion of retaliation claims (54 percent of all sex cases) is slightly higher than that for firing claims (50 percent). In broadterms, this suggests that there exists a consistent hierarchy in the frequency of claims about unlawful employer practices.Moreover, discriminatory firing and employer retaliation are, by substantial margins, the two greatest concerns of all plaintiffs,regardless of their race, sex, age, disability, or national origin.figure 2.8 :percent of cases by selectedtype-issue combinationsfiringretaliationpromotionpayhiring-8-