Court Opinion

ID: 9469024
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:30:08.214234+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:10.731154
License: Public Domain

Statement On Rehearing
WALD, Circuit Judge.
I am voting to deny rehearing and concurred in this opinion originally, on the premise that a prima facie case of sex-based employment discrimination must provide a reasonable basis for inferring that similarly qualified men and women are treated dif*74ferently. As the opinion explains, the data offered in this case was not sufficiently reliable to support such an inference. See majority op. at 69-71. In particular, plaintiff’s attempt to control for “special degrees” in her regression analysis failed because of the haphazard method by which such data were collected. See majority op. at 70 n.21. See also Tr. V, p. 47 (Testimony of Dr. Gastwirth). It does not follow, however, as the petitions for rehearing suggest, that plaintiffs will be required to provide job-specific data for every job requiring special qualifications. Thus I assume that in appropriate cases, plaintiffs may be able to make out a prima facie case of disparate treatment by employing reliable data that aggregate across jobs requiring specialized training. In each case, the critical question is whether there is a reasonable basis for inferring disparate treatment.