The Civil Rights Act of 1964-Title VII

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act barred employ­ers from discriminating against both employ­ees and job applicants on the basis of sex, race, national origin, or religion.3 The statute contained an exception known as the “bona fide occupa­tion qualification” (BFOQ), which recognized that there are “certain instances where religion, sex, or national origin is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enter­prise.” This exception provided a “gray area” that allowed an argument for the airlines to continue current employment policies, but it also provided a “wedge” issue to the unions to seek the com­plete elimination of discrimination against stew­ardesses in employment.

The agency charged with administering Title VII of the Civil Rights Act is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Stewardesses wasted no time in filing charges of sex discrimination against the airlines, citing age ceilings and marriage bans. The “no-mar­riage” rule was the first to fall when a grievance filed against Braniff, alleging discrimination under its work rules, resulted in September 1965 in a ruling favorable to the union, citing Title VII. This was followed later the same month by the EEOC issuing its general guidelines on sex discrimination, finding that the firing of

female employees for marriage was discrimina­tory when the policy was not also applied to male employees.

Agency rulings are often only way stations to the ultimate resolution of the issue(s) under consideration. And so it was with the major issues being contested by stewardesses, which included limitations on marriage, age, weight, height, and appearance. The contest between the airlines and female cabin employees or their unions gyrated around the filing of grievance procedures under the Railway Labor Act, filing civil actions in the federal courts based on federal statutes and the BFOQ exception, providing testi­mony in hearings before Congressional commit­tees, and appearances in hearings before various state agencies.

These efforts continued with mixed results as to the particular limitation at issue, until the case of Diaz v. Pan Am4 was brought in the fed­eral court in Florida in 1971. The sole issue in this case was whether or not sex was a bona fide occupational qualification for the flight attendant occupation. Efforts by men to enter this class of airline employment had been resisted by the air­lines ever since the advent of Title VII, and in the Diaz case the plaintiff was a man.

The federal trial judge ruled with the airline, basically saying that the BFOQ exception requir­ing females as cabin attendants was valid in the airlines for cabin service. You will recall that, in these pre-deregulation days, most air travel was by businessmen, and as long as the airline could show that having females in the cabin for service was better for business than having men, then the BFOQ exception was deemed valid. The trial court specifically found that the performance of female attendants was better in that they were superior to men in “providing reassurance to anx­ious passengers, giving courteous personalized service and, in general, making fights as pleasur­able as possible within the limitations imposed by aircraft operations.”

This case was reversed on appeal5 by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1971. The court noted that the preference of passengers was not sufficient to justify the exclusion of males in cabin service, given the statutory language requir­ing “necessity” in order to support exclusion. The court also noted that Pan Am, at the time this case was brought against it, already had 283 male stewards employed on some of its foreign flights.

Stewardesses would become flight atten­dants as a result of this case.

Still to come were the battles over weight and appearance limitations of female cabin atten­dants, and on the further polarizing limitation regarding pregnancy. In 1978, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act as an amend­ment to Title VII. Henceforth, pregnancy had to be treated on the same basis as other temporary worker disabilities.