The HR Practitioner's Guide To Adverse Impact Analysis

Why Should You Attend:

The idea of adverse impact has been around for nearly 50 years. Even though the concept is widely understood, employers are still faced with hundreds of discrimination lawsuits every year. The reason for this is that employers are taking the wrong approach to preventing adverse impact. Employers spend almost $300 million and countless hours every year in seminars talking about communication, conflict resolution and diversity. While this time and money we spend on training can reduce the occurrence of intentional discrimination, it does nothing to address the causes of adverse impact.

Managing the risk of adverse impact requires examining your employment policies and practices with quantitative tools. If you aren’t proactively monitoring for adverse impact, you may not learn of a problem until it’s too late. Many employers are unaware that one of their policies or practices is creating adverse impact until they’re faced with a lawsuit.

This presentation will equip you with some tools you can use to begin looking for adverse impact in your employment selection decisions, and teach you how to apply the analysis inferences to your business processes.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand what adverse impact is, where it occurs and why conventional discrimination training fails to prevent it.
• Learn how to use statistical tools to test for adverse impact and the limitations of those tools.
• Understand how to apply inferences from adverse impact analysis to business processes.

Areas Covered in the Seminar:

• Why adverse impact is a problem for employers and how conventional training fails?
• The theory of adverse impact and how it differs from intentional discrimination.
• Where in an organization adverse impact typically occurs?
• Common sources of adverse impact.
• The Four-Fifths Rule and its disadvantages.
• Basic statistical inference and statistical significance.
• Foundation of comparative statistical analysis.
• Calculation and evaluation of surplus and shortfall protected group selections.
• Criteria validation – job-relatedness and business necessity.
• The importance of properly defining the study population.
• Interpretation of analysis results: statistical significance, practical significance and sample size.
• Statistical tools typically used in adverse impact analysis.
• The limitations of statistics in addressing adverse impact.

Who will Benefit:

• HR and compensation professionals
• CFOs
• EEO and Compliance Officers
• Any person with an interest in internal pay equity

Instructor Profile:

Stephanie R. Thomas, Ph.D, is the founder of Thomas Econometrics. Dr. Thomas is a noted authority on compensation gender equity and the quantitative analysis of discrimination. She has authored numerous papers published in professional journals and regularly speaks to legal and industry groups on equal employment opportunity and affirmative action compliance issues and the statistical analysis of employment decisions. Dr. Thomas provides consulting services to Fortune 500 companies, privately held businesses and federal and state government agencies such as the Department of Justice and the FBI. She has testified as an economic and statistical expert in mediation, arbitration, and in federal and state courts throughout the United States. Prior to her consulting career, Dr. Thomas served on the faculty of New York University, where she taught courses on economic theory and econometrics.

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