When Congress enacted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it declined to enumerate or restrictively to define discriminatory employment practices. Concerning sex discrimination against women. Title VII makes it unlawful for an employer. These few words proscribe all sex discriminatory workplace policies, practices and behavior.
More than nine thousand discrimination complaints were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in its first year of existence when only two thousand had been anticipated. Not surprisingly, most of these claims charged employers with race discrimination.
The company thus classified or segregated workers on the basis of gender. Because both men and women were at risk, individual workers should have been permitted to decide whether to accept or reject that risk. An employer may not assume that women are less capable than men of making that choice. It is for each woman, not her employer, to decide whether her reproductive role or her economic role is more important to her and her family.
Thus, in the years immediately following the adoption of Title VII, the courts and the EEOC formulated broad legal principles applicable to issues relating to discrimination against women. To see how successful the courts have been in helping women eliminate sex discrimination from workplace, we now turn to a review of court cases that have applied these principles in sex discrimination claims over the last three and one-half decades.
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