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Women won’ t like this,
but Sugar was right and fair.
Why not ask a job applicant about
her childcare plans?
Magnus Linklater
Columnist: The TImes and Editor of the Scottish
Edition
Filed 17 Jun 07
©Magnus Linklater
This article was originally published
in The Times, 13th June 2007
It is reproduced here with the kind permission
of its Author and of the Newspaper
The candidate was up for a top job, and I,
as a sort of poor man’s Alan Sugar, was the interviewer. Unlike
Sir Alan, with his forthright questions and even more forthright
firing style, I was operating under severe inhibitions. I was not
allowed to ask about the applicant’s age, married status or
domestic circumstances. Indeed, until he/she walked through the
door I could only guess at his/her sex, since the name on the CV
in front of me was concealed by an initial – I think it was
J.
The rules under which I was operating were
laid down by equal opportunities legislation, which forbids any
line of questioning that might be seen as discriminating against
one sex or the other. This turned out to be geographically, as well
as domestically, challenging. The candidate in question (J was in
fact a woman) gave an address that lay some 400 miles due south
of where the job was going to be. I was not, however, entitled to
inquire whether there might be any difficulty in “relocating”
– that is, finding new schools for children, or bringing a
husband/partner along with her. When I strayed off-limits in an
unguarded moment by wondering whether she had any family connections
with the area, I was given such a sharp kick under the table that
I nurse the bruise to this day.
This, of course, was a public sector job
– the organisation involved was the Scottish Arts Council
– so the laws governing sex discrimination were applied with
bureaucratic rigour. But those same laws apply evenly across the
employment field, and most companies these days observe them to
the letter. When I complained that it was only fair to ask basic
questions about family, schools and moving house, I was told this
was unacceptable. Any female candidate who was turned down could
sue for discrimination on the ground that I had not asked similar
questions of the men, and I would thus have been guilty of gender
bias.
So, when Sir Alan challenged Katie Hopkins,
his would-be apprentice, on television last week, on whether her
priorities lay with her home and children rather than the job for
which she was applying, he was promptly accused of overstepping
the mark. Although in the end it was she who pulled out, rather
than he who turned her down, his suggestion that her commitment
was in doubt because she was more concerned about her children than
the job was seen to be driving a coach and horses through current
employment law. “If you ask a female candidate and not the
male [about such things as child care] it’s not just unfair,
it’s illegal,” Katherine Rake, of the Fawcett Society,
which monitors equal opportunities, told the BBC. A listener to
Woman’s Hour called to say that Sir Alan’s line of questioning
had been “horrific”.
Actually, I think he was being fair, not just
to his company but to Hopkins as well. Far better, surely, to have
these matters out in the open than to base a decision on post-interview
whispers, ill-informed speculation and the subsequent breakdown
of a working relationship. The employer who is investing not just
a substantial salary (in the case of The Apprentice £100,000)
but the health of the company in the executive potential of the
applicant he is interviewing needs to feel that he understands the
person as well as the employee. Most bosses, when pressed, will
say that identifying the well-balanced, well-rounded character who
can work with a team, or lead it, is ultimately more important than
finding the one who can read a balance sheet upside down. Questions
about personal backgrounds, wives or husbands, children and schools
are a far more natural way of getting to know someone than pressing
them on cost-benefit analysis or quality assurance schemes.
There seems no reason why men should not be asked
about the same things, but in the nature of things it is inevitable
that women, as home-runners, mothers and mothers-to-be, are more
likely to find themselves being cross-examined. And here is the
rub – does that mean they are automatically more vulnerable
to discrimination? The law says yes, but that is surely only the
case if the interview has been badly handled. Any woman applying
for a senior position is likely to have thought far more about the
necessary balance between job and home than the person she is being
interviewed by – and to have reached a solution she is happy
with. If she has not, then she is unlikely to be sitting on the
other side of the desk applying for the job. Being able to discuss
the solution she has reached openly and frankly is surely a better
way – for both applicant and employer – of judging whether
the balance has been well struck than one side trying to guess and
the other side to conceal.
Thus, Hopkins came to the conclusion, under Sir
Alan’s robust questioning, that her priorities lay back in
Exeter where her home was, rather than in the job she was applying
for. That, surely, was a better outcome than having to pretend that
she had found a way of caring for her children, when, patently,
she had not.
Such an approach would have to be applied evenly
between the sexes – and this too would be no bad thing. I
would have thought that the way a man responds to a similar range
of questions would be an excellent test of his aptitude. If he simply
answers: “Well, I leave that kind of thing to the wife,”
he is probably going to miss the salient detail in the next big
advertising campaign, or forget to ask the key question on which
an entire deal might founder – so he probably didn’t
deserve the job in the first place.
The good thing about Sir Alan is that he
rarely bothers to sugar the pill. You may not like the taste of
the medicine he hands out. But at least you know where you stand.
©Magnus Linklater
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