teller

In August 1973 Clara Watson, who is black, was hired by Fort Worth Bank and Trust as a proof operator. In January 1976 she was promoted to teller in the Bank's drive-in facility. Between February 1980 and February 1981 Watson applied without success for four supervisory positions, each time losing out to a white applicant. The Bank employed roughly eighty people and had developed no precise formal criteria for the positions. It instead left promotion decisions to the subjective judgment of white supervisors who knew the candidates and the jobs. Watson filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After exhausting administrative remedies she sued the Bank in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, alleging racial discrimination in hiring, compensation, placement, promotions, terminations, and other terms of employment. On her Rule 23 motion, the District Court certified a broad class of black applicants and employees, but later decertified it after finding no common question of law or fact. The employee subclass failed the numerosity requirement while Watson was not an adequate representative for applicants. The District Court then addressed Watson's individual promotion claims under the McDonnell Douglas and Burdine framework. It found that she had made out a prima facie case, but the Bank had articulated legitimate nondiscriminatory reasons for each decision. Watson had not proved those reasons pretextual. The court therefore dismissed the action. A divided Fifth Circuit panel affirmed the dismissal of Watson's claims and the class rulings, though it vacated the judgment as to the applicant class and remanded with instructions to dismiss those claims without prejudice. Watson contended that the District Court should have applied disparate impact analysis to the Bank's discretionary promotion practices. The Fifth Circuit held that Title VII challenges to discretionary promotion systems must be analyzed under the disparate treatment model. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve the conflict among the circuits on that question.