FWD: Hiring Discrimination

[Administrator at TECHWR-L <admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com>]

Forwarded anonymously on request:

As backup to the fact that it is impossible to prove age/sex
discrimination during the hiring process, I offer the following
example,

The company I work for is a small, privately owned software company. I
think we just hit the 100 employee mark, and that's a 100% increase
over 2 years ago.

In a recent discussion about hiring a technical writing intern, the
hiring manager made a comment that she was more interested in resumes
from male applicants and/or older women. Why? Because they don't get
pregnant and end up on mat leave for a year. I was aghast!! That's
discrimination. I understand their position, they've hired a lot of
people and many are on mat leave now or currently pregnant. Only about
50% of them return after mat leave. Small companies can have a hard
time financially - it takes months to train someone and then you have
to hire and train someone while they're on mat leave. If they return
after mat leave, you can potentially end up with more employees than
you really need. Contract doesn't work because of the time it takes to
train people on our software / systems / development environment, etc.
In my mind though, that's the cost of doing business. It shocked me
though to hear someone say it out loud.

Out of curiosity, how would you react to hearing that? Should I have
done anything with that information?

Anonymous

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