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It is a defense to disparate impact along protected class lines if it can be shown that the discriminatory factor is a business necessity. I'm less confident in how this plays out in practiced, how many bullshit claims of prevailed since the CRA, and how much bullshit claims have trailed off since.
Tons of US companies including elite hedge funds and so on, not to mention the US military itself, use extremely g-loaded standardized testing in recruitment. All your lawyers have to be able to prove is that people who score better on the test do better at their jobs, which should be trivial. Cases where organizations have lost (there was a fire department one semi-recently iirc) usually happen because they’re so incompetent they forgot to collect the data in advance of getting sued.
Even if that’s “all” your lawyers have to do (just draw the rest of the owl), that certainly may not be trivial due to range restriction, Berkson’s paradox, and normal distribution tail effects (e.g., Gladwell’s Fallacy).
IQ and (hypothetical) job performance could be strongly correlated in the applicant pool, but weak or even inverted among the employed.
It’s not trivial demonstrating that height is predictive of tennis and basketball performance using data on ATP and NBA players, respectively. Some fans, including hardcore fans, are even under the impression that it can be negatively correlated in some ranges. “Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic show that the optimal height for tennis is around 6’1”-6’2”, and players like Del Potro or taller are just too tall” is a common sentiment.
This is the whole SAT aren’t predictive of college performance. It’s not predictive once you have already filtered for SAT skills plus other categories.
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