Opinion ID: 721440
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The 1984 Finding of Liability

Text: 16 After the first remand from this court in 1982, neither party sought to introduce new evidence but agreed to submit on the existing record. 600 F.Supp. at 362-63. On the last appeal, referring to the defendant's later effort to introduce new statistics differentiating between the civil and foreign services, we observed that the district court's decision whether to consider new evidence after the close of the liability portion of a bifurcated trial was reviewed only for abuse of discretion. 19 F.3d at 1473 (citing Segar v. Smith, 738 F.2d 1249, 1285 (D.C.Cir.1984)). The USIA has again sought to offer new statistical analyses of data in the record, which the district court did not consider. We find no abuse of discretion. 17 First, the USIA now argues for two-tailed statistical analysis, as opposed to the one-tailed analysis actually performed for trial by plaintiffs' expert. The differences between two-tailed and one-tailed analysis are described in Palmer v. Shultz, 815 F.2d 84, 94 (D.C.Cir.1987), which ultimately favors two-tailed analysis for Title VII purposes, id. at 95. The key distinction is that one-tailed analysis tests whether a group is disfavored in hiring decisions while two-tailed analysis tests whether the group is preferred or disfavored. In two-tailed analysis, a larger difference (measured in standard deviations) between the actual incidence of (say) hiring of a class and the expected value is necessary before a social scientist would reject the inference that the difference was random. Id. at 92-96. On appeal, defendant offers new calculations of standard deviations that it claims reveal no statistically significant disparities in two job categories, using two-tailed analysis for the first time. But because defendant offered no calculations of standard deviations at all at trial, and indeed never objected to plaintiffs' expert's use of one-tailed analysis, we reject the claim. 18 For similar reasons, we reject defendant's claim that the district court should have considered yearly hiring statistics rather than the static snapshot statistics plaintiffs' expert provided (which might incorporate pre-Civil Rights Act discrimination). At trial, the defendant's expert presented hiring statistics in raw form only, with no effort to compute standard deviations or otherwise offer statistical analysis. In its reply brief the USIA essentially argues that the district court should have calculated the standard deviations itself, an argument plainly inconsistent with the conventional requirement that each party present the evidence and arguments on its side of a case. 19 On the question of whether civil and foreign service hires should be separated for statistical purposes, the USIA, in contrast to its silence on the point as regards class certification, argues on the liability issue in favor of such separation. But this is not only not the position it presented at trial, but is the opposite of it. At trial defendant's expert insisted that the Foreign Information Specialist Category (which was mostly made up of foreign service officers) could not be separated from the other job categories (mostly made up of civil service members) that he aggregated and compared with the census category Editors and Reporters. 20 Finally, the USIA challenges the district court's 1984 cross-mapping for the job category of foreign language broadcaster. Cross-mapping refers to the process by which the plaintiffs compared the male-female composition of the workforce in various USIA categories with the male-female composition nationwide in various private-sector job categories defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. The district court found plaintiffs' expert's choice of the Editors and Reporters census category to be well-reasoned, 600 F.Supp. at 374, rejecting the defendant's preference for the Radio Announcer category. The USIA now argues that broadcasting and announcing experience was an essential minimum qualification for the job. But the position description in the record suggests that the requirement was simply one of a voice suitable for international broadcasting, and other evidence indicates that men were hired for the position despite lack of broadcasting experience. Under the clearly erroneous standard, see De Medina, 686 F.2d at 1007, we find no reversible error in the district court's factual finding. 21 The USIA also claims that the district court should not have reaffirmed its liability finding given the new alleged discriminatory practices and evidence from intervenors. But the agency confuses the issues of certification and liability. The intervenors here, who were already members of the class, sought to become named plaintiffs and introduce evidence solely for purposes of certification; the evidence does not go to liability. The defendant having failed to show any properly preserved error in the analysis by which the district court reached its prior finding of liability, the new evidence is unnecessary to plaintiffs' success on that issue. Moreover, as the district court pointed out, the intervention would not adversely affect the anticipated remedial proceedings, as the intervenors who were civil service applicants would simply participate in Teamsters hearings just as they would have as class members, and those who were foreign service applicants would simply join others already seeking the 39 slots the court had set aside. 158 F.R.D. at 532 n. 3. We therefore affirm the district court's refusal to reopen its finding of liability.