I'm pleased to see so many speaking up in favor of keeping the personal
personal when asking job candidates questions.  As a feminist I'd like to
remind that the reason this is a "feminist issue" is that "the personal is
political" as we used to say in the 70's.  Personal characteristics that
have nothing to do with our skills or abilities can and will be used
against us...  or if we're lucky, for us.  But as many women know from
personal experience with things like pay-scale disparities, they are often
used against us.

Questions that uncover marital status at all are problematic since they
could lead to discrimination, and in many places discrimination on the
basis of marital status is illegal.  Discrimination could cut either way,
and often does but along gendered lines:  a married person may be thought
more responsible and stable or they could be supposed to be burdened by a
relationship that would constrain working hours or imply the imminent
arrival of children to breast-feed (as if single people, yes sometimes
even men, don't ever choose to parent alone.)

Another reason such personal questions can be problematic is that so often
they are phrased in such a way as to assume the interviewee to be
heterosexual. This places anyone who doesn't fit the category in a very
delicate position.

"What does my husband think about us moving?"  Answering this question in
what I would consider to be a truthful or helpful way would require me to
out myself, as in, "well, I don't have a husband, but my partner and I
have discussed it at length she's fully supportive of the move." Even if
the hiring institution has a very clear anti-discrimination policy
including sexual orientation, discussing one's sexual orientation can be a
very risky move in an interview.

How to explain this: to a non-heterosexual this whole line of
questioning about husbands and family plans begins to feel like a no-win
game.  I'll elaborate:

I could be cagier in answering: As in, "well, I'm not married, but my
partner and I have discussed it and we're both really excited about moving
to Iowa City."  The risk here is that then the interviewer asks another
question forcing me to declare the gender of my partner. Or the
interviewer may have figured it out anyway because almost no heterosexual
women seem to use the word "partner" (they simply say "boyfriend" or
"fiance" because it is clear, and easy.)  Or, I could plan to use caginess
as a strategy, because the sensitivity of the interviewer's response gives
me some information about the gay-friendliness of a potential workplace.

Or I could just say "I'm not married."  Which is the truth (almost... but
I won't go into that) but does leave out information if I do have a
partner and we do make life decisions together.  So it **feels** like a
lie.  And if I did get hired, I'd be in a situation where people around me
might assume I had no partner, and might feel I'd lied to them.

Or I could be witty and find a way of not answering that neither offends
nor reveals but instead shows my true skill at managing ridiculously
intrusive interviews.  But I can't even think of a witty response now and
I'm not in an interview...  So I guess the interviewer would figure out
wit isn't one of my skills?

Now if you find yourself asking why would I torture myself about such a
simple question, ask yourself why are you -the interviewer- asking a
potential employee this question?  When an employer asks me about my
husband, or about my faith, I have to ask myself what they really need to
know this for.

In asking about my "family plans" or about "what my husband thinks" what
is it you really want to know, and why are you asking it in a job
interview?  If it isn't going to be part of your decisionmaking process,
then why are you asking?  And if it is going to be part of it, can you
really be sure that you'd feel the same way about it if the answer you got
came from a woman or from a man?  Or from a woman of 20 versus a woman of
40?  Or from a married person versus an unmarried person?  Or from a gay
person or a straight person?  Or that you've asked your question in such a
way that information is revealed that you find it difficult to ignore,
even if it is illegal to use it as a factor?


When I think about how to interview someone I try to think about what do I
really need to ask that will help me discover if they have the skills
necessary for the job.  Your marital status, your age, your plans to have
children or not, your apparent skin color, your religion, your gender, and
your choices of partner: these will not tell me about what skills you
bring.  But your answers may tell me a lot about whether or not you are
similar to me.  And study after study has shown us that people hire people
who they feel are similar to themselves: in "race," in gender, in age, in
values and beliefs...  They make biased evaluations of people's competence
or skills for the same reasons.  They?  **We** do this.  We do, even if we
try not to.

So ask yourself, why do you really want to know?  And once you do know,
can you really keep it from influencing your decisions?  What if the woman
on the other side of the desk answers, "Husband? Family plans?  Well,
since you ask, I'm not married but my wife and I are expecting twins."

Now perhaps some on the list think it is okay to discriminate on the basis
of age, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, number of
nursing babies or other personal matters.  Perhaps some don't care whether
through active or unwitting selection they have "selected out" a perfectly
qualified candidate based factors that are not skills-related.  Acts of
discrimination in hiring are often illegal (but not often enough), even if
the questions themselves are sanctioned.

I will be job-seeking myself one day soon.  Perhaps my application will
come across the desk of a fellow museum listserver. Have I done myself
damage by outing myself?  Personally, I'd probably find it "damaging" to
find myself a member of an institution that didn't want me.

But mostly I hope that when employers stop asking these irrelevant kinds
of questions they will start finding out how "qualified" so many people
really are.  Qualified, perhaps precisely because they are not "the same
as" the people already at the institution.


And yes: I do blind grading too.  Early on I did "peek" to find out which
student wrote the exam I was reading.  And I was astonished at how
difficult it was not to "reevaluate" what I had previously graded based on
what was just not pertinent information.  Sometimes extra information is
just a burden.


Annette A. Wilson
_________________________                            _____________________
                          The University of Michigan
College of Architecture and Urban Planning  :           Research Assistant
 -Joint Programs-                           :    Interdisciplinary Program
3+ Master of Architecture    and            :         in Feminist Practice
Doctoral Program in Architecture            :              2125  Lane Hall
        Environment and Behavior            :                 734/763-3589
__________________________________________________________________________

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