Opinion ID: 501743
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Applicant Pool

Text: 53 The EEOC challenges the district court's characterization of its applicant pool, which was the source of the EEOC's hiring statistics, as inflated. The EEOC's expert Siskin constructed this applicant pool from the employment applications of 33,000 rejected sales applicants from 33 randomly selected Sears stores, and the applications of approximately 1,920 persons hired into full-time and part-time commission sales positions between 1973 and 1980 at approximately 210 stores. With the data Siskin attempted to determine the characteristics of male and female applicants by coding information from the applications onto computer tapes; in addition, the EEOC attempted to estimate the female proportion of sales applicants at all Sears stores on a nationwide and territorial basis. To identify all commission sales hires and promotions for 1973 through 1980, the EEOC also analyzed Sears' computerized payroll records for all Sears employees for those years. 19 See Sears II, 628 F.Supp. at 1294. 54 Using the payroll records, Siskin estimated the female proportion of full-time and part-time commission sales hires in the nation and each territory for each year from 1973 through 1980. To arrive at figures for the female proportion of full-time and part-time commission sales applicants, Siskin analyzed the sample of applications of nonhired applicants and counted as commission sales applicants all applicants who had applied for any job at Sears except those persons who requested only a nonsales job. The application, however, did not distinguish between commission and noncommission sales jobs. Siskin then compared the estimated percentages of women commission sales hires (actual percent female) with the percent of women in the sales applicant pool (expected percent female), on a nationwide and territorial basis for each year from 1973 through 1980. 55 The district court found that these comparisons resulted in large disparities between EEOC's actual and expected percent of female commission sales hires on a national and territorial basis for all years, with the z values, or number of standard deviations between the actual and expected figures, in a highly statistically significant range nationwide as well as in individual territories. 20 Sears II, 628 F.Supp. at 1295-96. 56 The court initially criticized the EEOC's applicant sales pool as inflated because Siskin included in the pool of applicants for sales positions anyone who had not checked nonsales jobs only. This meant that the EEOC considered as an applicant for a commission sales position anyone who had checked either sales, any of the above, or sales and another type of job (possibly including nonsales jobs). Furthermore, the court found that assuming arbitrarily that all members of the sales pool were applying for all commission sales positions at Sears in all divisions was one of the most serious flaws pervading all of EEOC's statistical analyses. Id. at 1301. We agree with the district court's conclusion that this led to an overinclusive sales pool, because it did not distinguish between commission selling and noncommission selling or account for differences in interests or qualifications among applicants. We also agree with the court's conclusion that the EEOC offered no credible evidence to support either the assumption that all applicants who indicated any interest in sales were specifically interested in commission sales or the assumption that all members of the sales pool were applying for all commission sales positions at Sears in all divisions, and that Sears' evidence proved that both assumptions were false. Id. at 1305. Based on the court's findings that women were differently qualified and interested in commission selling at Sears than were men, the court found women were disproportionately represented in the EEOC's commission sales applicant pool and thus were overestimated in the EEOC's expected percentage of women hires, which had been based on that applicant pool. The EEOC does not seriously challenge this conclusion, 21 and we do not find it is clearly erroneous.