Five women sued the city of Chicago after being passed over for paramedic jobs because they failed a required physical fitness test. The women claimed the test was designed to weed out women applicants and unfairly impacted women in violation of Title VII. Approximately 47 percent of women who took the test with the plaintiffs in 2004 passed, compared with more than 95 percent of men. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit held that the city could not prove the test was necessary to assess job performance for paramedics because it was based on a set of skill samples that don’t reflect what the paramedics actually do. The court recognized that “in itself, there is nothing unfair about women characteristically obtaining lower physical skills scores than men. … But the law clearly requires that this difference in score must correlate with a difference in job performance.” Without that correlation, the test “risks cementing unfairness into Chicago’s job-application process.” Ernst v. City of Chicago, Case Nos. 14-3783 and 15-2030 (7th Cir. Sept. 19, 2016).
Impact: While employers are not prohibited from administering physical tests for its job applicants, the test must actually measure job qualifications.
Mark T. Kobata and Marty Denis are partners at the law firm Barlow, Kobata and Denis, which has offices in Beverly Hills, California, and Chicago. Comment below, or email editors@workforce.com.
It would be useful to have a little more detail on where the employer went wrong. Did the employer require the same set of physical specs that are required for firefighters, or some other legacy link with another department that was no longer appropriate? Did the employer increase the physical requirements in excess of what is usually needed in the field, wanting to be sure that paramedics had an extra margin of capacity? We’ve all heard of employers looking for a unicorn in a striped suit, yet a lot of employers don’t realize that this applies to THEM until they hear the details of how another employer was guilty of that.
Hi Peter Mead, appreciate your comment. The author suggests you review the actual case for a full explanation. The court explains in great detail—about 20 pages—what was wrong with the test. Unfortunately this story appeared first in print, so space was extremely limited. “Essentially, the court states that the physical skills test was significantly more difficult than the actual job workers performed. The court then decided that the test was unfair because it adversely affected women, whose pass rate was only approximately 60% that of men.”
Thanks for reading …