USCA11 Case: 18-13592 Date Filed: 07/14/2021 Page: 33 of 80
(emphasis added). For instance, the Court noted that in Reed, Idaho’s “premise that women lacked experience in formal business matters (particularly compared to men) would have proved to be accurate” in many cases, particularly in 1967 when the facts giving rise to Reed came to pass. Id. at 202 n.13; 97 S. Ct. at 459 n.13; see also Reed, 404 U.S. at 76–77, 92 S. Ct. at 254 (invalidating provision of Idaho code reflecting the kind of “arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause,” despite whatever statistical accuracy underlay it).
Supreme Court decisions “following Reed similarly have rejected administrative ease and convenience as sufficiently important objectives to justify gender-based classifications.” Craig, 429 U.S. at 198, 97 S. Ct. at 457. As Craig recognized, the Supreme Court had in other Equal Protection cases “expressly found appellees’ empirical defense … unsatisfactory.” Craig, 429 U.S. at 202 n.13, 97 S. Ct. at 459 n.13 (citing Frontiero, 411 U.S. at 688–91, 93 S. Ct. at 1771–72; Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U.S. 636, 645, 95 S. Ct. 1225, 1231–32 (1975)). Thus the Court invalidated sex-based regulations despite empirical assertions of “the financial position of servicewomen and working women” even before Craig. Id. at 198–99, 97 S. Ct. at 457–58 (citation omitted); see also Frontiero, 411 U.S. at 688–89, 93 S. Ct. at 1771 (recounting how, in 1973, “the Government maintain[ed] that, as an empirical matter, wives in our society frequently are dependent upon their husbands, while husbands rarely are dependent
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