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All this will do is force companies which are not open to hiring older people and women will have to spend money interviewing them. They will still reject them and waste everyone’s time.


So... good? If companies that reject good candidates for no good reason find themselves having higher hiring costs, they'll have to either reajust their hiring criteria or spend more than their competitors.

Sure, it sucks for the interviewees for now, but there's potential to make things better for everyone in the long term.


>Three companies were cited for discrimination by both age and gender: Nebraska Furniture Mart, Renewal by Andersen LLC

First two are presumably looking for manual laborers who can lift heavy furniture and install heavy windows.

I previously worked for a moving company and tried to help fill my vacancy when I left the company. We would have been happy to hire a woman who could move sofas and dressers all day in a safe and controlled manner. (The company had previously had one female employee). There just aren't that many of them out there. The resumes I got from women had no indication of manual labor in their work history (they were just shotgunning applications out to every recent job listing). They would have been rejected based on work history (just the same as men) if we weren't desperate. However the company was very short on labor and I called every applicant. None of the female applicants showed up for a working interview

>and Sandhills Publishing Company.

The third is a software company that forces its employees to wear a suit to work. So maybe they're stuck in an antiquated sexist mindset. Maybe they just realized 82% of CS majors are young men.

I do think it's good to remove discriminatory job ad placement, for the sake of that 18% of the population. But don't think for a minute that this will change the gender imbalance in certain industries. It's a pipeline problem.


So the solution is to what, just look away and shrug ?

It's a process, you move goal posts one tiny step at a time and eventually it will become less and less acceptable.


Yes fair point, I was going to say biased people will not hire anyway but you have a point. This way you are leveling the playing field.


Don't even look away. Just accept that people do differ by birth characteristics and that there are often legitimate reasons to discriminate based on those factors. There's no shame in that.

Look at firefighters. To get a female firefighter in New York they had to lower the strength tests. Those tests were calibrated to be able to carry people out of a burning building. Do you really want a 'process' that one tiny step at a time leads to people eventually burning to death because their rescuer was a tiny 5ft girl who couldn't lift them?

https://nypost.com/2015/05/03/woman-to-become-ny-firefighter...

Or more prosaically, do you think men should be lingerie models? Or people too old to run should be hired to take care of very young children?


I Disagree with you on the word "often". There are far many jobs where physical body doesn't matter (and even there, you wont accept fat young guy either, so you might as well just list what do you expect candidate to be able to preform), than those that do.

Now lets look at a story in question:

> In the latest rulings, the EEOC cited four companies for age discrimination: > Capital One, Edwards Jones, Enterprise Holdings and DriveTime Automotive Group. > Three companies were cited for discrimination by both age and gender: Nebraska Furniture Mart, > Renewal by Andersen LLC and Sandhills Publishing Company.

No firefighters, no lingerie models ( I thought there were male underwear models).

As far as who do I expect to become firefighter ? Anyone who can do the job. If it means only males can do the job (I have no idea hoe true that is), I am fine with that exception. But if there is a woman who can lift just as much as average firefighter, and want to do the job, why would you prevent her from doing it ?


You may expect that about firefighters, but people with the same definition of progress as you see that as a problem to be solved by lowering the bar.

I think you're also drawing a rather arbitrary line here, based on assuming the differences between young/old/male/female are purely physical. But that's clearly not the case. If you're looking for a salesperson for your motorbike store, you'll probably have more luck fishing amongst men than women and that's not discrimination unless your job ad literally says "no women allowed".

That said, I do agree programming is not a job where there's any obvious way or reason to do such targeting. But presumably these companies had reasons for making those choices. Why don't we hear their side of the story?




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