Is discrimination (in hiring) morally wrong?

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midori said:
How about you? When you hire people to perform a moderately skilled job that requires some amount of education, how do you turn a 2" stack of resumes (or a 5" stack, or a 10" stack) into a final batch of serious contenders?
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Good question. Once I was a dept. head in a moderate-sized company (90+). I made up an exam that mimicked what you had to actually do in the job (for example, I photocopied a page of one of our books–the applicant had to find the ambiguous passage; another question was a computer printout of statistics from a recent test–where was the mistake?; another question was a paragraph I made up filled with grammatical, capitalization, and punctuation errors–the applicant simply had to circle the errors; another question was “Make up a multiple choice question based on this paragraph.” And finally, the toughy–5 math questions: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of 3-digit numbers. And then the proportion quesiton: “If 6 apples cost $1.20, how much would one apple be?” Virtually no one got that right–not even math majors. And this is what, a 5th grade level question?

So OK, say I got 100 resumes. Probably half are tossed because they are filled with mistakes, clearly not qualified, etc. So I have 50 left. I called them: “Here is the salary range for the job. Interested?” If they were still interested, they came in to take my test–1 hour. An impossible task. It was supposed to be. Then it was simply a matter of looking at the scores on the test. The top 5 or so were invited to an interview.

And yes, I rejected perfectly qualified people–those people whose education, background, and experience were very similar to my own. I didn’t need “another me,” I needed someone different from me.

Who got hired through this process? A college grad with a 4.0 average (yes, I wanted to see transcripts) who had a Harvard law degree. An engineer from U. of Tennessee with a 4.0 and perfect college board scores. Etc.
 
Usually when people talk about discrimination, they’re thinking about either things people can’t change, or things they shouldn’t be expected to change. Race, sex, disability status - these are things that we can’t change. A black woman can go out and get an engineering degree, but she can’t become a white man. People can change their religion and (to some extent) family status, but we generally think that there’s a societal interest in making sure they don’t have to in order to get a job.

Pretty much every country has a bona fide job requirement exception too - for example, if you have a manual labor job, you can have strength requirements even if many women won’t meet them. Or to use an obvious case, if you’re hiring an actor for a play you can discriminate for someone who looks like the character. (There were some interesting legal cases with hooters regarding this; I think one area forced them to reclassify as an “adult establishment” in order to maintain their hiring practices.)
 
Socrates92 said:
The lines could be blurred too. If I were to hire a not-particularly-well-qualified friend (or little brother) for my small 6-person startup, simply because I liked working with the guy, would that imply that I’m stealing from an indeterminate number of other people that hypothetically could have had the position? Undeniably the friend lucked out, simply because he happened to know me, but I’m not sure you can argue that I wronged anyone else.
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Erikaspirit16 said:
And we all know about hiring friends and family (Trump on down). Sometimes that works, but I suspect most of the time it doesn’t, simply because the odds of a friend or family member having the best possible qualifications are almost nil. [edit]

As for “stealing,” I’ll stand by that. If I have the best qualifications, I deserve the job. If you take it away from me, you might be causing me irreparable damage (you never know).
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I’ve always wondered about that, too, hiring relatives.

If the manager hires his brother-in-law, okay, maybe the brother-in-law was “qualified,” but you know the manager didn’t conduct a nationwide search to find the person in the country who was most qualified. So I’d see that as stealing a job from someone who’s more qualified.
 
signit said:
So I’d see that as stealing a job from someone who’s more qualified.
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I’d say that the owner decides who is qualified. It is his company and he should be allowed to hire whoever he wants. If he hires enough unqualified people then his company will fail, but it is his prerogative.
 
THAT’s your best response? Turning it back on me? The ad hominem attack is a weak attack. Well, I meant in a general sense, because in my duties, I see men only rarely. You assume looking would make them uncomfortable. You don’t know men. They’re like peacocks and more than happy to be noticed. It’s just women who wear short skirts, show cleavage, and then complain that men are leering at them. It’s hilarious.

Saying something is nonsense doesn’t make it so.

The thing you need to learn is you can’t create some utopia where everybody does things as YOU think they should, or as leaders think they should. In fact, if you didn’t express any of your thoughts, and I didn’t express any of my thoughts, the world would go on pretty much as usual.
 
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Dictionary definitions aren’t going to be helpful when discussing things like this. Because if you think “discrimination” just means making distinctions, then when another person thinks “discrimination” means unjust prejudice in hiring, then there argument is going to just be talking past one another.

There are clearly some things that should be considered with respect to new hires. Skill, experience, etc. But skin color, age, religion, sexuality (yes yes I know, I know, just roll with it for the sake of argument), and certain disabilities with accomodations shouldn’t.

A jewish person is just as capable of waiting tables as catholic person, as a muslim person, as a mormon, as an atheist - if all other qualities are being equal. Same with various skin colors, ages, etc.
 
Lara said:
For instance, a manager might discriminate against a pretty woman because he knows the guys would never do their work with her walking around there.
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You cannot discriminate against a “pretty woman” simply because she is “pretty.” However, if she wore something you found to be provocative, inappropriate, and/or unprofessional to the interview, you could because you felt she was “unprofessional.” Because people typically dress conservative to interviews. If a woman was dressed too sexy for an interview, chances are pretty good that she would be less conservative in the job.

Same goes for men.

But the point is, it really has to really be an issue of professionalism and not an issue of prejudices disguised as professionalism.
 
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Just to play devils advocate.

If somebody claims to have a right to employment…
Doesn’t that mean that somebody out there is obligated to give them a job…?

(There actually might be a really good rebuttal for that…I’m just spit-balling here)
 
Lara said:
For instance, a manager might discriminate against a pretty woman because he knows the guys would never do their work with her walking around there.
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I was thinking about this some more… you can also not hire someone because you simply don’t think that person would be a good fit with your current staff.

But you’re going to need a better reason than “she’s too pretty.”
 
Cecilia_Dympna said:
You can’t seriously think that an employer should be able to not employ attractive women (maybe in the situation you give as an example the employer should discipline the inappropriate sexist male workers?).
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It all shakes out in the end. For instance US airlines used to only hire attractive women. Then modernism took hold. Flying European airlines was then more pleasant. Now the Asian airlines are the best.
Lara said:
Yes, feminists tend to be less pretty. They have a hardened look on their face and an aura of anger. There is a noticeable chip on their shoulder and they want to control people with their words.
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I agree. People, especially over time, tend to look on the outside how they are on the inside.
 
Meh, that’s a form of discrimination, based on qualifications, how those are defined. (The government might see them differrently than an employer). For the right position, all of those things you mentioned at the end could also be grouped under “qualifications”.
Catholic school teacher - religion relevent
Nurse: well, women in general are more empathetic than men - being female strongly correlates to being a good nurse
Age: strongly correlated to maturity, experience, able-bodiedness, likelihood to stick with the organization, etc
Race: Certain cultural knowledge could come in handy in some positions
 
And you can choose not to hire somebody because you don’t like them. It’s that simple. People need to allow for differences in style and differences in preferences.

Say a university wants to hire people with pink hair, tattoos, and nose rings who follow leftist ideology, nobody is stopping them. If I don’t want to hire the very same people, I shouldn’t have to. It’s that simple. I could have one hundred legitimate reasons I should hire them, but my personal preference is for normal, conservatively dressed people.
 
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What if I want to open up a restaurant, and market myself as a specifically Catholic environment? Maybe I want my waitresses to be up-and-up on Thomistic theology so that they can carry on stimulating conversations with my very niche clientele. Might be a major business flop around here, but you never know!
 
Socrates92 said:
What position(s) were you hiring for?
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Assistant director. The person would be in charge of testing for a large (30,000 students) national continuing education program. But I did a similar process for customer service people. Let me add that good work paid off, unlike other places. I kept getting calls about one customer service rep; customers loved her. I gave her a $5,000 raise on the spot. We had another cash bonus program–there were 10 tasks everyone knew about. Every month we would draw one of the tasks at random. Whoever performed that task best–there were written records–got $100 in cash on the spot. When we started the program, the 10 tasks represented “problem” areas. By the end of the year, there were NO problem areas. And yes, I had to contend with a corporate bureaucracy and HR dept. But you know what? That was MY job.

But it all starts with hiring the right people–and NOT your friends and relatives.
 
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Then it becomes a bona fide occupational requirement.

Kind of like how hooters can discriminate in hiring waitresses in ways buffalo wild wings can’t.
 
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