The notion of non-discrimination and equal opportunity have for decades been a piece of the international community's key principles. Enshrined in several international instruments, including conventions of the United Nations and the International Labor Organization, these ideas are rooted in universal principles of human rights, fundamental freedoms, equality and fairness. In today's rising markets, companies that seek to be leaders and set examples of corporate social responsibility while structuring a productive and diverse workforce must address issues of discrimination in the workplace. Businesses that make it in doing so act decisively to eliminate discriminatory practices and create the conditions for diversity and equality of opportunity and treatment in employment, often going past what is required of them by national law.

Background
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act are all laws that have an effect on the growth, administration, and use of employment tests and practices. These laws and their repercussions to employment testing and practices are reviewed below.

The Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution
The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires that all states must guarantee equal protection for its citizens. Thus, the laws of any state must be such that all individuals are given equal opportunities regardless of their group membership. The Fourteenth Amendment also gave Congress the Constitutional power to enforce equal protection of its citizens by enacting laws to uphold this right. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1991 are some examples that are presented below.

Under Title VII, employment unfairness based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin is unlawful. An employer can oversee and use the results of any selection test so long as it does not discriminate against individuals because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Contrasting treatment and disparate impact are both prohibited under Title VII. Disparate treatment happens when an employer intentionally discriminates against an individual on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The fundamental issue in disparate treatment cases is that employees from a protected group are treated differently from others intentionally. Disparate impact also takes place when an employment practice or method is consistently applied to all employees; however, it results in a disproportionate number of individuals from guarded groups in being excluded. Disparate impact is unlawful under Title VII when the employment practice or method is not job-related or steady with business necessity. The allocation of evidence and the shifting of burdens for producing proof and confirmation differ in court between disparate treatment and disparate impact.
In disparate treatment cases, there are more than a few methods by which a plaintiff can present his/her evidence to the court. These methods are as follows: direct, shifting burdens, varied motives, and pattern discrimination. In the bulk of disparate treatment cases, the plaintiff lacks straight substantiation of intentional discrimination. The Supreme Court has created a burden changing method following the McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green (1973) case. The plaintiff has a prima facie case if the following requirements are met:
(1) the plaintiff is a member of a protected class;
(2) the plaintiff applied and was qualified for the job;
(3) the application was declined;
(4) the position remained open after the elimination. Then the weight shifts to the employer to provide proof that there were legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons for its actions.

After the employer presents such substantiation to the court, the burden then transfers back to the plaintiff. The plaintiff must persuade the court that the employer’s evidence was not true and/or that it was a pretext for discrimination.
In disparate impact cases, the plaintiff makes a prima facie case by proving that the challenged practice or selection tool has considerable adverse impact on a protected group. The evidence that is used is often arithmetical in nature. Then the load shifts to the employer to prove that the challenged practice or assortment tool is job-related and consistent with business necessity. If the employer provides suitable evidence that is accepted by the Court, the burden then moves back to the complainant to offer evidence that shows that another selection tool exist that would satisfy their business needs with less disparate impact. Employers have a duty to ensure that their employment tests and practices do not result in discrimination. All tests used for employment judgments for instance hiring, and promotion need to be evaluated to assess that they are 1) job related
2) consistent with business necessity
3) free from disparate impact.
If the test screens out a disproportionate amount of individuals from a protected group, then the boss needs to assess whether any different tests or procedures exist that would yield the same ability to predict performance but lessen the disparate impact. Having this evidence is critical for employers if their employment practices are ever challenged. Title VII describes the employer as being obligatrd to produce compelling evidence to support the employment test under question as being job-related and consistent with business necessity.

If results are unsatisfactory, local norming may create less biased scores. If results are not available, additional testing may be achievable, given samples of sufficient size.Examiners control the remaining items to a large, diverse group of people called a standardization sample or norming sample. This sample should show every important characteristic of the population that will take the final version of the test. Statisticians assemble the scores of the norming sample into an array called a norming distribution. In order to tackle concerns regarding racial and ethnic group representation in the norming sample, some test developers connect in racial and ethnic group oversampling,that is including larger numbers of individuals from different racial and ethnic groups above and beyond their proportional representation in the overall population. Supplemental norms may then be formed for a particular racial/ethnic group. Tests such as the Wechsler scales frequently incorporate this oversampling procedure (cited in Suzuki, Kugler, & Aguiar, 2005). Ultimately, clients or other examinees take the test in its final form. The scores they find, known as raw scores, do not yet have any interpretable meaning. A clinician evaluates these scores with the norming distribution. The comparison is a mathematical procedure that results in new, standard scores for the examinees. Clinicians can understand these scores, whereas interpretation of the original, raw scores would be complicated and impractical in the absence of a comparable norm group (Reynolds, Lowe, et al., 1999). Standard scores are virtual. They have no sense in themselves but derive their meaning from certain properties—typically the mean and standard deviation (SD) of the norming distribution. The norming distributions of many skill tests, for example, have a mean score of 100 and a standard deviation of 14. A client might obtain a standard score of 125. This score would be well above average, because 125 is almost 3 SDs of 16 above the mean of 100. Another client might attain a regular score of 94. This score would be slightly below average, because 94 is almost one third of a SD below a mean of 100. Here the reason why raw scores have no meaning increases a little clarity. A raw score of,33 is high if the mean is 30 but low if the mean is 50. It is very far above if the mean is 30 and the SD is 2 but lower if the mean is again 30 and the SD is 15.
Many norming samples include only a few minority participants,eliciting suspicion that the tests produce inaccurate scores—misleadingly low ones in the case of ability tests—for minority examinees. Whether this is so is an important question that calls for scientific study (Reynolds,
Lowe et al., 1999).

Conclusion
Employers should try not to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. This is of specific importance where either there is a mixture of different races within a country's national population or there are distinct groups of migrants or immigrants. It is vital that an employer considers the potential for both direct and indirect discrimination in this perspective and, in line with some of the examples given in this Good Practice Note, seeks to put into practice policies and procedures to decrease the possibility of discrimination. It is also unlawful employment practice for an employment firm to refuse to discriminate against, any individual because of his race, color, religion.

Resource: the American Psychological Association (APA) Code of Ethics