Re:Hacking attractiveness biases in hiring? The role of beau...
by leereeves on Thursday April 28, 2022 @11:21PM
(#31201025)
Well, competent legal representation wouldn't have been much help if you hadn't had some favorable law to call upon, so I suspect you may be wrong that "being in a protected category has never really helped me avoid discrimination".
As for the first part of your comment, I'd just like to ask: what is up with disadvantaged groups fighting one another about who's more disadvantaged?
I do agree about poverty; that's a big disadvantage and is often itself the foundation of another prejudice. That's another group that the law fails to protect.
Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being gay. Society finding you conventionally unattractive and thus passing you over for a promotion at work isn't exactly the same thing. People are discriminated against for lots of reasons, many subconscious, but protected categories didn't emerge from a vacuum. The reason being queer is protected whereas being short or ugly isn't has nothing to do with queer people having more power in government (lol) but because there was a history of actual violence, much of which was state-sanctioned, against queer people.
Then again being in a protected category has never really helped me avoid discrimination; having enough money to afford competent legal representation did. I wonder how many Americans can afford that when the majority can't make a $500 emergency expense. I'd argue the poor are the most clearly discriminated against group in our society and clearly there's a history of direct and indirect violence against them on that basis alone, but capitalism requires their existence and so they're invisible to our judicial system.