Employment: When Is the Difference Unequal?

Sex has not been much of a subject for official debate since women got the vote. Now, however, as an unpredictable result of the 1964 Voting Rights Act, la différence bids fair to stir another furor. At issue is a clause in the law that bars job discrimination because of race, color, religion, national origin —or sex. Among harried employers, the new law has become known as the “Bunny problem,” because of an extreme but oft-cited example of the problems it may pose. Suppose, runs the hypothetical question, a man applies for a job as a Playboy Club Bunny.

Would the law require that he be hired?

The problem is far from frivolous.

The sex clause affects all U.S. employers of 100 or more workers, a limit that will drop to 25 in three years. A new federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, has been set up to enforce the antidiscrimination ban— and seems likely to become Washing ton’s most embattled bureaucracy.

Since the law went into effect last July, 306 complaints of sex bias have been lodged with the commission. Typical was the case of a woman employed as an assembler in a California electronics plant. Although she holds a degree in electronics, she wrote, and could make from $1 to $3 an hour more as a technician, her employer refused to pro mote her on the convenient ground that she might have to lift something weighing more than 25 Ibs.— which would violate a California law that prohibits women workers from doing just that.

To help employers decide where sex ends and discrimination begins, the commission, chaired by Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., recently drew a set of guidelines defining unlawful sex bias. From now on, ruled the commission, it shall be unlawful to:

> Treat jobs as men’s or women’s work unless the employee’s sex is “a bona fide occupational qualification” (it takes a woman to model women’s clothes).

> Refuse to hire men or promote women “because of the preferences of coworkers, the employer, clients or customers,” unless the need is obvious, as in theatrical roles.

>Forbid the hiring of married women, unless the same rule applies also to married men.

> Use separate seniority lists that discriminate against either men or women.

> Publish separate “male” and “female” help-wanted ads without a disclaimer that U.S. law forbids sex discrimination.

While Roosevelt does not believe the commission’s guidelines “will cause a revolution in job patterns,” he promised that the commission would “work cautiously” to avoid creating absurd situations. They will doubtless arise anyway. What about the woman pilot who aspires to be an airlines captain? Or the man who loves kids so much that he applies for a job as a nanny? The male homosexual who would like to fit bras for a living? Hardly more farfetched is the case of two prostitutes, Jeanette McDonald and Hattie May Smith, who have appealed convictions in Oakland, Calif., on the grounds of sexual bias. They were discriminated against, say they, because the male customers who were with them when they were arrested were released without charge.