This isn’t about Hooters or similar restaurants. It’s about a family-owned breakfast & lunch diner with one location. I’ve been eating there for years. They have about 10 servers who are mostly young attractive women. One server looks like she’s in her 40’s, two of them look like 30’s, and the rest are 20’s. I’m curious as to how they can get away with that for so many years, as I don’t think they could survive a million-dollar lawsuit.
Lots of possible answers here, but as a foundational matter if they have less than 15 employees then they are not subject to federal employment discrimination laws.
Have others that are capable of doing the job been turned down for the position, and does their advertising for positions indicate in any way that they are looking for a certain type?
I’ve never seen a “Now Hiring” sign or anything and I don’t know if they advertise online or in newspapers.
Exactly this. The fact that the restaurant has no male servers doesn’t necessarily mean that the restaurant will only hire female servers. For probably a bunch of reasons, waiting tables (particularly at less-expensive restaurants like these) is far more likely to attract women than men to the jobs.
There are several small, family-owned, breakfast-and-lunch diners in my area, which I have frequented for years. Nearly all of the servers at all three have always been women; there was one guy who worked at a server at one of the three, and then left there, to go to another of the three.
I tend to doubt that any of the three would only hire women, but who knows?
Don’t be so sure it’s not a theme. Boob-dinners are a thing now. There’s one here in Dallas and there’s one in Tulsa that my mom (of all people) took me too.
Mom is pretty oblivious, I don’t think she realizes it’s a breastuarant.
Never mind.
It’s not a boob diner. The servers are showing almost no skin.
They probably have less than 15. Besides the servers, there’s a manager, a cook, and a trash guy.
Is anybody else reminded of a certain Seinfeld episode?
That’s what I thought of. (Spoiler; in the Seinfeld episode, all of the waitresses were daughters of the owner.)
[Moderating]
While the content of this post is on-topic, the tone isn’t so great. There are plenty of less crude ways of conveying the same point, including the term “theme restaurant” used by the OP. Who already stated that this isn’t one.
What are they getting away with? Until someone from a protected class has a compaint there is no issue.
There is no controlling agency watching the hiring practices of companies in the US. Complain and someone may eventually look into it. No official complaint, no case started.
It seems to me it IS a theme-restaurant of sorts.
The “attractive young woman” theme. I think I’ve seen restaurants like that before.
Joey isn’t going to stick around as a waiter in a place like that because he’d get shitty tips. Maria, OTOH…
Asked and answered, but to one point of the OP that hasn’t been addressed is that, even if someone did have standing to bring a case against them and won, it wouldn’t be a multimillion dollar lawsuit. It would be based on the potential wages that an unfairly unhired individual would have received, which is probably in the low thousands at such an establishment at best, most of which would go to the lawyer(who would be unlikely to take such a case on contingency anyway).
The standard, by the way, for a business to qualify for a “bona fide occupational qualification” exception to employment discrimination statutes is that the business has to demonstrate that the discrimination is reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the particular business or enterprise.
And so Hooters was able to successfully argue in a couple of lawsuits that the female waitstaff was integral to their business operations, as their marketing, brand awareness and ability to draw customers was deliberately oriented around the experience of being served by attractive female waitstaff. But even then, they were forced to open up positions like bartenders and hosts to gender-neutral hiring.
I don’t know if there’s any valid studies, but this is my first impression. That the only ones who would get tips comparable to good looking well-dressed young ladies would be sweet old ladies. Perhaps, too, men don’t want to do what’s considered “women’s work”. Everyone is sexist, whether we admit it to ourselves or not.
Me too.
I agree with this and other similar posts. However the fact that these young women and only these young women have been hired could be evidence (not proof) that the restaurant is discriminating based on sex.
I mean, sure, if I have a completely open hiring process but “just happen” to only hire white Christian and conservative males then some lawyer who represents a woman who was rejected at my firm will have a prima facie case.
OP says ‘mostly’ - so is that 8-2, 7-3, 6-4? If its a single operator business do they fill vacancies by word through recommendations from staff to their friends, which I am guessing would skew to friends of the same sex? Is this sufficient to explain the discrepancy before getting into imputations of deliberate manipulation of some notional evenly balanced pool of potential workers?