Goldman Sachs Gender Decrimination

On September 15th, Goldman Sachs Inc. had a lawsuit brought against them by three former employees, all of women. The Plaintiffs are: Cristina Chen-Oster, who was a former vice president of the firm, Lisa Parisi, who was a former managing directer, and Shanna Orlich, a former associate.The three women are not only trying to get rewards for themselves, but all women with similar position titles at Goldman Sachs. This is a clear case of gender descrimination in the workplace. The women have a very strong case against the powerful company. The complaint filed states that there are few women with high level jobs at Goldman.

As the job level increases, the amount of women decreases. The lawsuit also claims that Goldman Sachs is biased against women when evaluating employee performance. Lisa Parisi, the former marketing director, claims that a senior marketing analyst gave her "demeaning and menial assignments," like making copies and answering phone calls from his wife. This is not the first time that something like this has happened in an office.In 2004, investment firm Morgan Stanley was sued for 54 million dollars by a woman with similar claims as this case. This is happening more and more these day and it is just unfair to make a salary lower and not have the same opportunities to get promoted or even get a job based on if you are a man or women. I believe that this was not fair for the former employees and Goldman Sachs has to change their ways. Times are changing, and even though there has never been a women in charge of a major Wall Street firm, they should not limit what people can do based on their gender. Goldman Sachs will hopefully have to pay for what they did and it will also teach them a lesson to avoid something like this in the future and will not only help out the three women that took the initiative to bring Goldman Sachs to justice, but to also help out all women at the company to increase their salary and job titles just as easily as men.

Gender Discrimination at Hooters

A man in Texas has filed a lawsuit against the restaurant chain Hooters for not hiring him because of his gender. He says that he was not hired because the job as a server is reserved for women by an employer who only wants to exploit their sexuality for business. The vice-president of Hooters made this comment regarding the situation, "If we lose this go around, you can next expect hairy-legged guys in the Rockettes to line up and male models in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue." He's got a point. Hooters relies on women to get business. People go to Hooters expecting to get an attractive female server and if some man showed up it would hurt the image of the restaurant. Also, Hooters has an agreement in which Hooters agreed to create jobs for men limited to kitchen staff, bartender and manager, but the job of server is to be reserved for women. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 there is to be no employment discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex, color or national origin. However, there is something called a bona-fide occupational qualification defense, BFOQ for short, which allows discrimination in certain situations. Discrimination is permissible if a certain class (women in this case) is necessary to have operations run normally. A good example of this is having airline pilots retire when they reach a certain age. So if Hooters can prove that having women only servers is necessary to normal operations of their business, which shouldn't be very hard, then this man's case will have no chance. This man knew that he wouldn't get the job as a server and did this just for the money. But was he proving a good point? I don't think so. This business relies on women servers to get business and most people know that and by not hiring men, they are not discriminating because a male server would put a damper on this business which highly advertises good looking women as your server.