Retail Clothing Chain Notorious for Bigotry Looses Supreme Court Case Over Discrimination Against Muslim Woman

Abercrombie & Fitch: The company needs to get over itself.

By Barbara Leonard
Abercrombie & Fitch must pay after deciding not to hire a teenage Muslim girl because of her headscarf, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

     Samantha Elauf was 17 in mid-2008 when she applied for a sales job at an Abercrombie Kids store in the Woodland Hills Mall in Tulsa, Okla.

RELATED STORY: Abercrombie & Fitch model tells of 'racism, sexual harassment and discrimination' at store

     Abercrombie calls its sales associates "models," and holds them to a "Look Policy" that involves showcasing the preppy brand. Though the policy prohibits models from wearing black clothing or caps, it offers no definition of the term cap.

     Elauf had worn a traditional veil for Muslim women known as a hijab since she was 13. A friend of Elauf's who already worked at Abercrombie asked an assistant manager at the store whether Elauf could wear her scarf to work if she got the job.

RELATED STORY: Abercrombie & Fitch Supports Racism, Sexism & Size Discrimination  

Noting that a different employee wore a yarmulke, the supervisor said a non-black headscarf would be fine.

     The policy on headscarves never came up when a different assistant manager interviewed Elauf and scored her style as a 6, amounting to a recommendation that the store hire the applicant.

     When that supervisor sought approval for Elauf's hijab, however, a district manager found the headscarf inconsistent with Abercrombie's look policy.

RELATED STORY: Clothing Chain Accused of favoring whites for its sales floor jobs

     Though the woman who conducted Elauf's interview testified otherwise, the district manager later told the court that he did not know he was being asked about a scarf worn for religious reasons.

     The interviewer meanwhile said she received orders to change the score card she had filled out on Elauf, thus ensuring the girl would not be recommended for hire.

     After Abercrombie declined to hire Elauf, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit.

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Is There's a '2% Black Solution' In Play at Tech Corps?: Mysterious 'Consistency' at Google, Yahoo and Facebook — Only 2% of Their Workforces is Black

There a 'strange' consistency among the biggest Internet tech companies with regard to their hiring (or lack of hiring) blacks: Let's call it "the 2% solution." For Facebook and Yahoo, only 2% of their workforce is black, for Google it's a "whopping" 1%. For a number of years, companies like Google and Yahoo refused to release data on the ethnic/gender make up of their work forces, hiding behind the "trade secret" excuse. Now we know what they were hiding. These geek giants don't even pretend to make an effort at including blacks who are no doubt frozen out due to the subjective interview process and the nature of the culturally biased screening employed by these companies.

So-called 'diversity' hiring figures for Facebook (top left), Yahoo (top right) and Google (bottom): The percentage of black
employees never reaches higher than two percent. So what's the job description of those blacks who do work for these
companies?  One wouldn't be surprised if most had job titles like "security" and "maintenance."

New stats show Facebook is run by a bunch of white dudes, just like Yahoo & Google

By Ruth Reader
Facebook released its company diversity stats in a blog post yesterday. The post, by Facebook’s Global Head of Diversity Maxine Williams, discussed the company’s commitment to diversity — but even she admits Facebook has a long way to go.

RELATED STORY: Tech Giants' Secret Hiring Agreement Kept Salaries Low, Ripped Off Workers -
Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Others Settle for $324 Million

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg may run the show at Facebook, but she’s mostly directing white guys. Facebook is 70 percent male and 57 percent white, but white guys really reign supreme at the senior level, where they occupy three-quarters of the jobs...

Hispanics make up four percent, multiple ethnicities three percent, and black employees make up two percent of the company workforce. Those demographics are pretty evenly distributed across tech, non-tech, and senior level jobs.

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Religious Discrimination Found in America's South: Study Finds Employment Discrimination Against Muslims and Possible Preferential Treatment for Jews

Photo by woodleywonderworks.

Study Structure and General Findings

Researchers sent resume's to advertised job openings throughout the American South which were randomly altered to indicate one of seven possible religious affiliations or a control group.

1) Applicants who expressed a religious identity were 26 percent less likely to receive a response from employers.

2) In general, Muslims, pagans, and atheists suffered the highest levels of discriminatory treatment from employers, a fictitious religious group and Catholics experienced moderate levels.

3) Evangelical Christians encountered little, and Jews received no discernible discrimination.

4) Evidence was found suggesting the possibility that Jews received preferential treatment over other religious groups in employer responses.

The full study can be found below: Click the arrow (<) on the left side to view the document without thumbnails.

The Shocking Lack Of Diversity On This Week’s Sunday Shows

The lack of diversity on the major Sunday morning news programs has been written about for many years.  Clearly the producers of such programs don't give a shit what the rest of America thinks.—Ronald David Jackson

David Gregory, host of Meet The Press. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

By Annie-Rose Strasser
The Sunday political talk shows have drawn repeated criticism for filling their lineups with disproportionately white, male guests. But if this week’s lineup is any indication, the shows aren’t working too hard to fix the disparity.

Between CNN, Fox, CBS, NBC, and ABC this Sunday, there were no women or people of color featured as the main, solo interviews of the show. Even in the roundtable discussions that follow the featured interviews, the participants were unrepresentative: Eight women joined the roundtables, while 15 men were part of the conversation.

Of the 38 total guests between the one-on-one interviews and the roundtables, there were five people of color. None of the shows had on more than two women, or more than two non-white guests.

The lack of diversity is simultaneously most and least surprising on a week in which foreign policy has dominated the news cycle. All of the shows featured discussion of the ongoing unrest in Iraq. And while international news may seem like an area ripe for diverse perspectives, the U.S. foreign policy establishment is overwhelmingly male.

On gender, NBC’s “Meet The Press” was the worst offender this week. Its lineup featured only one woman — Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who joined the political roundtable — while 10 men came on as guests. And when it comes to race, “Fox News Sunday” took the award for least diverse; none of its guests were not white.

Part of the problem is systemic. These Sunday shows seek to have on the key decision-makers who influence policy inside the beltway, and those people are largely white, male, and not reflective of the demographics of the country.

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Yahoo Details its Mostly-Male Employee Diversity Data for the First Time

For years tech firms like Yahoo have resisted providing data on the diversity of their workforces. Companies like Google and Yahoo hid behind the excuse that such information was a trade secret. The (lack of) diversity data for Google and Yahoo seems strangely similar.
—Ronald David Jackson

By Josh Lowensohn

Yahoo today became the latest tech company to reveal the gender and ethnic demographics of its employees, disclosing that the majority of those workers are white males. Yahoo's broken down both gender and ethnicity profiles for its 12,200 employees globally and in the US where the company is headquartered. It's also detailed those genders and ethnicities across its tech workers, non-tech workers, and leadership group, which comprises predominantly of white males...

RELATED STORY: Geeks and Race - Google Resisted Publishing the Racial Makeup of Its Workforce for Years — Now Expects Kudos For Admitting Only 2% of it's Workforce is Black

Results from the three are difficult to compare primarily because of size. Google employs nearly 50,000 people globally, which is more than four times the size of Yahoo. LinkedIn, meanwhile has about 5,400 employees. Nonetheless, Yahoo and LinkedIn are more similar, with women in both companies coming in at less than 40 percent of overall employees. The two companies also had very close white and Asian ethnicity makeup among its US employees.

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Geeks and Race: Google Resisted Publishing the Racial Makeup of Its Workforce for Years — Now Expects Kudos For Admitting Only 2% of it's Workforce is Black

#466470519 / gettyimages.com

For years tech firms like Google have resisted providing data on the diversity of their workforces. Companies like Google and Yahoo hid behind the excuse that such information was a trade secret. Now we know why Google fought so hard to hide the racial and gender makeup of its workforce: only 2% of its workforce is black and women are woefully underrepresented. If Google was really serious about increasing diversity in its workforce, it would have started working on diversity years ago when it was first confronted on the issue. Google's hiring practices suggest that a wider discussion about racism among Nerds and Geeks is long overdue. As Eric Ware points out, "Geek racism appears to be a growing trend that is picking up steam and becoming more vocal based on social media trends." —Ronald David Jackson

Only 2% of Google's American Workforce Is Black

By Max Nisen
The technology industry is frequently thought of as a place that’s heavily white and male, and often unfriendly, if not hostile, to women. Google took a look at its own diversity record and released the data to NewsHour and in a blog post, and it confirms many fears.

According to the data, women make up 30 percent of the company’s total workforce, and 21 percent of its leadership. Only 17 percent of its technology employees are women. It’s data that the company hasn’t released before, and much more than others in the tech industry have made available.

Only two percent of the company’s total U.S. workforce is black, and three percent is Hispanic. Asians are comparatively overrepresented given their share of the U.S. population, making up 30 percent of the company’s American employees.

The gap is most acute among the company’s tech workers. Here’s the full breakdown of the company’s technology-specific workforce, which at Google mostly means engineers. The top two gender numbers are global, and the race numbers are from the U.S. only:

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Can't Find Blacks 'Worthy of a National Radio Show' Says Chris ‘Mad Dog’ Russo of Sirius XM Radio

Chris ‘Mad Dog’ Russo. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

When a caller named ‘Warrior’ asked why Mad Dog radio has never had a black host, Russo, rather ineloquently, tried to explain that there weren’t any qualified hosts around.

By Bob Raissman
Chris (Mad Dog) Russo lapsed into a Donald Sterling moment Friday, creating his own controversy when he told a caller he has not found a black host “who is worthy of doing a national talk show.”

With sensitivity running high, it’s perfectly fine to discuss Sterling, especially on sports-talk radio, where controversy sells...

(click to see full sized image)
Based on the staff pictures of so-called 'liberal-progressive' news
organizations, one could conclude they agree with Russo.

(Clockwise from top left - Democracy Now!, NPR interns, NPR staff, Politico managers,
Huffington Post staff, Trueslant staff, NPR staff, Alternet staff, Middle - Open Democracy
staff.)

In an interview Friday night with the Daily News, a defiant Russo was not backing down.

“The idea that I wouldn’t hire a black talk-show host, a Korean talk-show host, or a talk-show host from Mars is absurd,” Russo said. “If there is any person of any ethnicity who wants to get a job at ‘Mad Dog Radio’ and we feel he or she is capable of doing a national talk show at the highest level, I’d put them on in a second. Let’s just say we are not being overwhelmed by resumes.

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