Dothard v. Rawlinson

On 27 June 1977, the Supreme Court ruled on the case. In a split decision, the Court affirmed part of the district court's ruling and rejected another part. Specifically, the majority affirmed the lower court's ruling that the height and weight requirement was discriminatory on its face, but rejected the claim that the banning of women from close contact positions in male prisons was a violation of civil rights law.

On the first question, the Court held that Rawlinson had indeed shown evidence of employment discrimination by pointing out, through the use of national statistics, the disproportionate impact in hiring the height and weight standards had on women as opposed to men. Furthermore, the Court found that the state of Alabama had done nothing to show that the height and weight requirements had any relationship to job performance on the grounds that size or strength was a necessary condition for employment as a prison guard. The state of Alabama, Justice Stewart wrote in his majority opinion, "produced no evidence correlating the height and weight requirements with the requisite amount of strength thought essential to good job performance. Indeed, they failed to offer evidence of any kind in specific justification of the statutory standards."

But Stewart and the rest of the majority parted company with the district court on the issue of the "close contact" prohibition. The Supreme Court considered this regulation a "bona fide occupational qualification" and therefore not grounds for a discrimination complaint under Title VII. In defending this assertion, the Court cited the violent atmosphere of male penitentiaries, the close contact with guards necessitated by dormitory style living arrangements and chronic understaffing, and the presence of sex offenders in the prison population. The Court concluded that the presence of female guards would therefore pose a significant security problem. "A woman's relative ability to maintain order in a male, maximum-security, unclassified penitentiary of the type Alabama now runs could be directly reduced by her womanhood," wrote Justice Stewart. "There would also be a real risk that other inmates, deprived of a normal heterosexual environment, would assault women guards because they were women."