Disparate impact

Discrimination can be either intentional (disparate treatment) or unintentional (disparate impact). Disparate treatment is when people are intentionally treated differently based on their membership in a protected group. Disparate impact is when there is an unintentional impact on a protected group based on an arbitrary business practice. ¹

One of my summer jobs was working for the park district of my home town. The park district would employ high school and college students to be park leaders in community parks. As a park leader, we were responsible to entertain local children with outdoor recreation and activities such as crafts. Performance evaluations are based on how many people attend park events. In most cases, white employees were set to work at parks with mostly white children in the neighborhoods surrounding the parks and black employees were set to work in parks surrounded by mostly black neighborhoods. I assume that managers set it up this way so that the neighborhood parks were set up with someone more likely to be a part of that neighborhood and to integrate into that neighborhood better, but this created a disparate impact situation. The situation arose because since performance was evaluated on then number of people attending park events, white employees were promoted more often than their black counterparts. This was because the “white parks” were more in upper middle class neighborhood where there were more stay-at-home moms that had the time to be more involved in park events.

Even though the park district had good interest in mind when placing park leaders at certain parks, their methods resulted in disparate impact. To my knowledge, no legal cases have been filed against the park district, but after taking Human Resource Management, I would not be surprised if cases had been filed since there is a just reason to file a complaint. 

1.        Kleiman, Lawrence S. "Understanding the Legal and Enviromental Context of HRM." Human Resource Management: a Managerial Tool for Competitive Advantage. Cincinnati: Atomic Dog Pub., 2007. 32. Print.