I read an article about how appearance discrimination in the job market isn't just silently condoned, but openly and rampantly practiced in China. There is research showing that the US, short or fat people earn less money than their thin and tall counterparts, and that both women and men gain career advantages from being physically attractive, up to a certain point, after which they aren't taken seriously anymore (especially women). But in China, job ads openly specify that they don't want short, ugly or fat people.


This apparently legal there. You're not allowed to discriminate against someone just because she's a woman (although I'm sure plenty of companies still do), but you can discriminate against her for being an ugly woman.

So what exactly stops this sort of thing from happening so blatantly in the US? Can you sue an employer for discrimination on the basis of appearance, if it is unrelated to race or sex?

As far as I can tell from the wiki article on employment discrimination law, there is no legislation directly against discrimination onthe basis of appearance. However, it is illegal to have an emplyment practice which discriminates against a protected group disproportionately - even if that group is not being intentionally targeted.

So in the Beijing hospital ad, for example, they asked for someone at least 5' 2.5". This wouldn't be allowed in the US unless the employer could show that they needed tall people for job performance reasons. There's no laws against discriminating against short people directly, but doing so would disproportionately impact people of certain races and national origins, or people with certain disabilities, which is illegal.

So what about Hooters not hiring male servers? Why is that ok?

Because it's acknowledged that at Hooters, only half the job involves serving food. The other half is being a model.

But in a job where physical appearance was irrelevant to job performance, what if an employer was careful enough to advertise for physical features that did not fall disproportionately on certain protected classes of people? You could advertise for clear complexions, or symmetrical features, or toned abs, or straight teeth. Even if the job in question were "computer programmer".

It would be legal to advertise for that, as far as I know. But it would be kinda stupid.

Why?

1. You're setting yourself up for a lawsuit even if you are super careful about the discriminatory attributes not being able to be tied to a protected class. People can sue you even without any real justification, and people can make any kind of convoluted argument you might imagine. For example, advertise for clear complexions, and someone is going to sue you because their race is more prone to breakouts (whether true or not).

2. It's stupid from a business perspective. Unless the item you are discriminating on has a valid business reason (maybe you sell skin cleaning products so you only want to hire salespeople with clear complexions for example) you are artificially limiting your pool of good applicants for a position, and not getting the most efficient use of your hiring dollars. So you have 3 potential candidates for a job, but the most qualified (or the one you can get for the best price) you've already weeded out via your irrelevant criteria. (And if its not related to job performance in some way, it is by definition irrelevant). Another company that does not use this irrelevant criteria will hire this person instead. In the aggregate, that leads to a less successful company.*

3. Culturally here in the US, it would be really bad press.

*the only argument against this point would be that the criteria is NOT irrelevant, but is still discriminatory - Maybe you don't want to hire Hispanics because you know your customers are bigots--you'd still be legally required to hire them, but you'd have in incentive to discriminate anyway.

Well, I guess number 1 doesn't happen much in China. Other sorts of discrimination (like sex and age) are supposed to be illegal, but China's court system isn't exactly known for being friendly to small plaintiffs.

Number 3 doesn't often happen in China either (well, except for in the symmetrical boobs case). Culturally and historically, there hasn't been the sort of civil rights movement type of awareness-raising to train people to think that stereotyping is bad. Some job ads blacklist people from entire provinces just because they have a local reputation for being argumentative or greedy or whatever. People may think ads for pretty nurses are ridiculous, but then they fork over the money for plastic surgery because the alternative is not getting a job.

Which leaves number 2. Why does the market fail to weed out discrimination?

Regarding your point 2.

It might be that the item has a statistically relevant connection to something important for job performance, but using it is still discriminatory. Like men on average are more interested in martial arts (at least within a relevant target demographic) and you want your sales personell to be able to manhandle violent customers . Testing applicants for martial arts skills does have costs, as you need to come up with a test that actually works and need to administer it, and have personel able to do that, and it might also send a message for the applicants, that they could demand extra money for an additional qualification. So hirering only or primarily males might be a rational business decision.

Well, that would explain why the vast majority of assembly line workers are young women, who are thought to be more nimble with fine detail work. And it would explain porters and drivers are pretty much exclusively men. It might even explain height discrimination to some degree, because in a poor country like China, height is correlated with nutrition and health. And of course you might want to have more attractive people in sales positions.

Yet there are still many instances of appearance discrimination which patently have nothing to do with the job. What on earth does having symmetrical tits have to do with your ability to be a civil servant? Or what does height have to do with being a file clerk?

Such requirements might spil over to other departments. Copying lists of requirements from other departments, rather then making them on your own is a not so uncommon practice.*

And there could be public relations maneuvers. The civil service or the company should be associated with hip modern attractive people, not with some weired gremlins shuffling around.

And for positions, where you don't need much specialized knowledge, but that most people can do in principle, it will be a long time, till you feel any problems from limiting your pool of applicants, so such rules can stay for quite a while.


* Like some Austrian states have hunting seasons, for animals that don't live there natrually

Also, point no. 2 presupposes a competing company that does not discriminate on irrelevant criteria. If you have 20 companies, and 10 of them only employ male drivers while the other 10 ignore gender and employ based only on ability, then the second 10 will have a very slight advantage (assuming that their test for ability works as it should); but if all 20 will only employ male drivers, then they're back to an even footing once again. (Note that this is a very slight advantage, and can be easily cancelled out by other factors, at least in the short term).

In the case of civil servants, this problem becomes particularly egregious, in that there is no competition for the Government. The file clerk that files your tax return can have any appearance discrimination for his position that the government can think up; it's not as if there's a competing tax office there to drive them out of the market.

More's the point, I don't think there really is even a slight advantage, in many cases. Most jobs are not that highly skilled, and can be performed by a lot of people. If there are 6,000 unemployed people in the city who meet my idiosyncratic criteria of appearance and who are perfectly capable of filing things away, and I only need four people to file things away, what do I really gain from opening up applications to the other 40,000 unemployed who don't fit my criteria?

Point. There are a billion people in China. Unemployment is also said to be notoriously high amongst college graduates; China appears to educate more people than its manufacturing-dependent economy can currently absorb.

That's pretty ironic, considering the Western economies educate more people than our "services" and "human-capital"-dependent economies can actually absorb.

But anyway, as to why markets don't "weed out" stupid requirements, that's because people are not perfectly rational. A delusion held by everyone looks the same, to a market, as a rational fact everyone knows.

I think one of the more interesting conversations in regards to appearance discrimination is actually the one that most people write off as "That's justified" - appearance discrimination in movie and television casting.

Hollywood is one of the few places in the US where you can actually put a job interview out which specifies which race qualifies for the role. On the surface, this seems rather justified, since one of the primary reasons that an actor is being hired for is for their looks - Directors and Producers typically have a vision of who will fit a particular role, so if they're specifically looking for a black actor, or an asian actor, or a pretty actor, or a tall actor, that seems an appropriate time to specify appearance in a job listing.

Except, of course, that this leads to a lot of black and asian actors getting very few roles, and very few good role. It means that actors who aren't Hollywood Pretty tend to be limited to bit part roles, even if they're exceptional actors. It means that fat actors tend to be relegated to comedic roles. It means that if a job description doesn't include appearance directions, then they're probably going to hire a white pretty person, even if an actor who isn't white/pretty manages to get an audition.

It's the perfect border case to discuss really. I mean, I would like to think that I'd prefer to see the best actor on the screen, rather than the prettiest actor who can also act, but I have to admit, I find it hard to think of a hollywood actor that I wouldn't consider attractive. I get a bit angry that people kvetch so much when, say, fantastic black actors like Idris Elba get roles like Heimdall, who in the source material was white, but I get equally as angry with situations like The Last Airbender where the roles that in the source material were definitely not white end up with white casting. It's a much more complex issue than just appearance or race - so it's far more interesting to discuss in this context...

I think in movies, the thin blurry line I draw is in suspension of disbelief. If they decide to change the (expected) race of a character, but it doesn't sink suspension of disbelief, then go for it. Black Ford Prefect in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, OK, why not? An entire cast of white people in an Asian-themed fantasy universe, erm, I don't find that convincing. It looks like a buncha white kids playing dress-up in their pajamas.* It would be as jarring if they'd made a Harry Potter movie where the setting and the costumes all said British boarding school, but everybody inexplicably spoke with Alabaman accents.

As for the default setting in Hollywood being Pretty White Person, ah well. I expect that will change as American demographics do. Supposedly this year, the majority of babies born in the US were not white. I've noticed that BBC dramas tend to have more realistic looking actors. There's minority and older not conventionally pretty looking characters whose subplots don't revolve around their appearance. The Black character doesn't have to do Black jokes all the time and the fat person doesn't spend the entire time whining about how fat they are. They're just there.

* Also it pisses me off that Hollywood sees fit to borrow Asian culture, minus all the Asians.