HYIP-Man: Ask HN: Is it legal for a company to restrict an internship to certain races?
Saturday, November 24, 2018
Ask HN: Is it legal for a company to restrict an internship to certain races?
Ask HN: Is it legal for a company to restrict an internship to certain races?
I'm a person of color working for a large tech company in San Francisco. I was disgusted to find out that we have a paid internship program that is explicitly only limited to people of certain races. 1) Description on website: "...is a paid 12-week summer internship program designed for second-year students interested in gaining hands-on and real-life experience in the tech industry." "Eligibility: Full-time student identifying as black, Latinx, and/or Native American completing your undergraduate study in 2021 at a university or college." 2) Is this legal? I am familiar with affirmative action, but all examples I have seen describe it as stuff like: "language on job advertisements urging minorities to apply, or a policy that favors African-Americans when all other qualifications among job applicants are equal.". I've never seen a company explicitly say that only certain races are eligible. If someone can point me to some credible sources discussing this specific issue, it would be great. 3) Assuming this is not legal, how do I get them to stop? Based on what I know about the company, this is not the work of an unsupervised employee, but something that was likely approved by upper management. The company has an ethics hotline that guarantees confidentiality and non-retaliation, but I've seen the company break confidentiality and retaliate when they were promised in the past. I can't file an EEOC complaint because I wasn't discriminated against. The application deadline just ended and they are now interviewing candidates. I'm afraid that if this ends up being controversial, instead of stopping racial discrimination, they will just hide it better by not putting up an explicit notice. People working here seem morally fine with this sort of discrimination. They don't seem to notice the hypocrisy of saying in huge letters "[Company Name] is where inclusion lives" and then linking to a page that excludes people from a job on the basis of race.
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Written at 11:50 PM by Frank.
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