Microsoft Legal Issues

10 Pages 2620 Words

, since the company’s 1997 percentage of minorities was closer to 16 (Gebler, 2001). From the perspective of Jackson’s lawyer, however, the 2.7 percent of African Americans in the workforce coupled with the fact that only 1.6 percent of the company’s 5,155 managers were African-American “demonstrates to the world that Microsoft is not interested in hiring or promoting blacks” (Wilcox, 2001).
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its amendments prohibit job discrimination against applicants and employees on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, and gender—whether intentional (disparate-treatment) or unintentional (disparate-impact). On the surface, it appeared that Microsoft was failing miserably in its obligation to create a workplace free of exactly the kind of discrimination that Title VII was meant to prohibit.
But appearances can deceive. In Donaldson v. Microsoft, the court concluded that the plaintiffs “failed to establish the existence of a class of persons sharing any common claim of discrimin...