Opinion ID: 803961
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Specific Employment Practice

Text: The Port Authority next argues that there was insufficient evidence to support the plaintiffs’ disparate impact claim on the ground that plaintiffs either failed to identify a specific promotion practice resulting in a disparate impact on Asian Americans or failed to show that the Port Authority’s promotion process could not be separated into component parts for analysis. According to the Port Authority, the promotion process involved three separate 33 steps—recommendation by a commanding officer, approval by the Chiefs’ Board, and selection by the Superintendent—and these steps were wholly capable of being separated from each other for the purpose of statistical analysis. For the following reasons, we disagree. To make out a disparate impact claim (or, more generally, to rely on statistical evidence), a plaintiff must identify a specific discriminatory employment practice. See Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 131 S. Ct. 2541, 2555–56 (2011) (“[R]espondents have identified no ‘specific employment practice’ . . . . Merely showing that Wal-Mart’s policy of discretion has produced an overall sex-based disparity does not suffice.”); Watson, 487 U.S. at 994 (“Especially in cases where an employer combines subjective criteria with the use of more rigid standardized rules or tests, the plaintiff is in our view responsible for isolating and identifying the specific employment practices that are allegedly responsible for any observed statistical disparities.”). Title VII, however, expressly provides that “if the complaining party can demonstrate to the court that the elements of a respondent’s decisionmaking process are not capable of separation for analysis, the decisionmaking process may be analyzed as one employment practice.” 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(k)(1)(B)(i). Whether a particular decisionmaking process is capable of separation for analysis largely turns on the details of the specific process and its implementation in a given 34 case. See McClain v. Lufkin Indus., 519 F.3d 264, 278 (5th Cir. 2008); cf. Meachem v. Knolls Atomic Power Lab., 381 F.3d 56, 74 (2d Cir. 2004), vacated on other grounds, 544 U.S. 957 (2005). Here, the evidence amply demonstrated that recommendation by the Chief’s Board could not be separated from the rest of the promotion process for the purpose of statistical analysis. Such recommendation was neither necessary nor sufficient for promotion, and the weight it carried in the process was both unclear and variable. For example, two candidates who were not recommended by the Chiefs’ Board in January 2003 were nonetheless promoted by the Superintendent later that month, even as others who received unanimous recommendations from the Chiefs were not promoted for a year, or two years. Another Superintendent did not bother to use the Chiefs’ Board at all. Recommendation by the Chiefs’ Board was therefore not capable of separation from the rest of the promotion process. The commanding officers’ recommendations were similarly inseparable from the Superintendent’s ultimate decisions regarding promotions because they played an indeterminate role in the integrated promotion process. For example, former Chief Thomas Farrell testified that he occasionally would ask for performance evaluations of everyone on the eligible list—not just those who were recommended by commanding officers—while other testimony indicated that 35 commanding officers’ recommendations were often important in the promotion process. We therefore agree with the district court that these “steps” in the promotion process were not capable of separation for analysis. See Port Auth. II, 681 F. Supp. 2d at 464. Accordingly, the decisionmaking process involved in promotions to Sergeant was properly analyzed as one employment practice.