Nouri

MEMORANDUM **

Plaintiffs/appellants (also referenced as “the Nouri Class”) are engineers and technical workers who initiated a class action alleging race and national origin discrimination under 42 U.S.C. § 2000e et seq. (“Title VII”) and 42 U.S.C. § 1981 against appellee The Boeing Company (“Boeing”). 1 Appellants alleged both disparate treatment and disparate impact claims under Title VII; however, only the disparate impact claim is at issue on appeal. Appellants allege that Boeing violated Title VII by using a facially neutral classification *597 and compensation scheme that resulted in statistically significant lower salaries for members of the Nouri Class, as compared to similarly situated Caucasian employees. The district court determined that Boeing’s compensation scheme did not disparately impact the salaries of the Nouri Class and ruled in favor of Boeing.

The experts on each side utilized “regression analysis” to evaluate Boeing’s compensation and classification system, and both experts studied the same variables, with two significant exceptions: (1) Boeing’s expert considered the effect that labor market demand (“year-of-hire”) had on starting salaries, whereas…