When it comes to hiring people for jobs usually you can’t do it based on items such as one’s ethnicity or gender. Doing so will open up the doors for discrimination accusations. With that in mind, this was a fascinating post that billionaire Mark Cuban made where people are saying he admitted to doing something illegal. He starts off by saying he doesn’t hire anyone “based exclusively on race, gender, religion” which is good I suppose. But then he further comments saying “And yes, race and gender can be part of the equation” in regards to the notion of hiring the right people that will put his business in the best position to succeed.
That’s where the controversy lies as it kind of implies he does indeed hire people based on things such as race or gender. It generated a response from the EEOC commissioner on how things like those can’t be a motivating factor. So is he in trouble now by openly admitting this in he public? I personally don’t think anything will happen to him immediately, but it shows why so many corporations tend to only let people in PR do public posts like these huh?
I’m not sure what the technicality is such as I know he owns a men’s basketball franchise where he has to choose say a male player over a female for obvious reasons. Like there you could argue his first statement is just like that where sometime you have to factor in things like gender. Or, the other perspective is he could be hiring people for traditional jobs knowing say their ethnicity or gender will resonate well with the audience and hence makes it a useful business tool.
It’s one of those things where I wouldn’t doubt companies do al the time but can’t actually say it for legal reasons. It’s interesting how in some industries such as film and theatre these practices are normal since the story or production needs specific types of people to tell the story and you often hear backlash if companies don’t hire people that naturally match say the character traits in a story. So there definitely isn’t a one law standard for everything per se in every situation. But if we are talking about traditional jobs such as working in the office where you are primarily crunching numbers all day then not solely hiring based on skills will definitely rise eyebrows.