femininely. In response, Hopkins quit the firm and filed suit under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which forbids employers to discriminate on the basis of a person's sex (Sachs 66).
In May 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Price Waterhouse had based its decision on unlawful sex stereotyping. The decision shifted the legal burden of proof to the employer, which should make it easier for employees to win future Title VII cases. Experts say that the decision's main effect may be to force companies to eliminate bias in the people making important personnel decisions for them. The decision was a landmark for antidiscrimination, but we should not overemphasize its power. Even now, after a long and expensive court battle, only 28 of Price Waterhouse's 900 partners are women (Sachs 66). Encouragingly, evidence from a 1986 study by the National Academy of Sciences also shows that the mere existence of antidiscrimination laws may help foster change, either because employers fear reprisals for discriminatory practices or because such laws help reshape expectations about what it is acceptable for women to do ("Sex" 2).
One avenue of reform which the U.S. Supreme Court has long supported is the use of affirmative action plans. While it doesn't involve top level management, the case of Diane Joyce is worth looking at as an important precedent. On March 25, 1987 the court ruled that the public transportation agency of Santa Clara County, California was justified in giving a road dispatcher's job to Diane Joyce rather than a man. Joyce scored two points lower on a test than the man did, but a panel of supervisors found her to be otherwise just as qualified (Dwyer 36).
The decision was based on the fact that the agency's affirmative action plan met the Court's three criteria for fairness. The plan was flexible, temporary, and designed to gradually correct the imbalance in the overwhelmingly white male work force. ...