Ask HN: Is it legal for a company to restrict an internship to certain races? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it legal for a company to restrict an internship to certain races?

36 pointsworkquest721 comments

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.

> for a large tech company in San Francisco

The company is easily identifiable just by searching for the text you quoted, so you're not really hiding which company you're working for (if that's your intention).

As to whether this kind of discrimination is legal: I'd assume a company that size has a huge legal department, and any corporate program they run has been vetted by their lawyers. So there's probably some loophole in the law that makes it legal.

By the way, offering the internship only to second-year students would be age discrimination (it effectively excludes almost everyone older than 40, who are a protected class under federal law), and offering it only to full-time college students would be discriminating against people who can't afford to attend college full-time (e.g., because they have families they need to support).

You can go to university at any age.

People over the age of 40 can be in their second year of college, can't they?

They are far less likely to be, so even though it's not discriminatory on its face, disparate impact analysis applies. Note, however, that disparate impact analysis for age discrimination is on a weaker standard (“reasonable factors other than age” rather than “business necessity”) than most other workplace disparate impact discrimination analyses.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/regulations/adea_rfoa_qa_final_rul...

> The company is easily identifiable just by searching for the text you quoted

If anyone else is wondering: https://twitteracademy19.splashthat.com/

I see, it's an internship targeting hiring minorities - thanks for the link. I am a middle aged white male, and there are lots of internships that seem to be primarily hiring white and asian males, and we need to encourage more minorities and women in cs and I guess I'm okay with this. The reason is that if we try really hard to encourage nontraditional people to be devs, we are going to be more likely to get some of them over the hump.

I don't think internships targeting minorities lessens the value of non-minorities and reduces their opportunities in life, because there are so many jobs already for asian and white male programmers. I have realized that no one ever tried to explicitly look for someone like me in their job listings - a white male from a non-name school. I didn't get into harvard or mit, I didn't get an internship from a prestigious school, I didn't work with a famous professor.

I did have the advantage that everywhere I looked, there were people looking like me working at leading companies. I just had to pass interview loops and get into that school. I was never the first woman or black guy in a group - I was just another white male. So maybe think about that if you hate on this company. What if you were trying to do something and you "looked different" than everyone else - it would be so much harder.

I am specifically wondering about the legality of this, not the morality. I wanted to avoid this discussion, but I guess its already brought up.

You are okay with job postings that are the equivalent of hanging up a "No Asians Need Apply Sign"?

I'm Asian. I grew up in a place without many Asians so I looked different than everyone else. I remember I was once in a community group of over 100 people, and the only other people of my race were my immediate family. I didn't have parents that were up to date with college admissions so when the college application asked my race, I filled it in, not knowing that they'd use it to discriminate against me.

I'm going to stay purposefully vague to avoid doxxing myself, but all Asians aren't the same. Yes there are some groups that are doing very well in Silicon Valley but there are other groups that you hardly ever see.

In my first job, I was in fact the only Asian person on the team. It's not that uncommon for that to be the case outside of California.

It sounds like you might think separate but equal is an acceptable doctrine for jobs: "It's okay if you can't have this internship you want, it's for people of X race, but don't worry there are so many jobs already for people of your race." It's a good thing it was abolished in Brown v. Board of Education.

All I want is an equal opportunity for people of my race. Whenever someone wants to discriminate on the basis of race, they rationalize and justify why it is okay in this case. Luckily society has realized this and has created bright line rules so we don't end up on a slippery slope of when is it okay to racially discriminate. I thought job postings where certain races are excluded was way beyond this line and I hope the law agrees.

It's great that you had an advantage in life. Give back and help those who don't. But don't use your power to restrict the opportunities of other people who don't share your race or thoughts.

I don't think separate but equal is okay. I was also afraid of the racial end but decided to make a hopefully non-inflammatory comment. I am not okay with things that say no Asians or no whites or no whatever. I was trying to describe something else, encouraging people of different backgrounds to do this dev stuff too. Like I said, no one in my entire 30 year long professional career every said "I wish we had more people like you" (meaning white men). Never once. No one said I wish we had more people from my school or state (which are both severely underrepresented in cs, I've only ever met one other programmer from my state, never another one from my undergrad school). I do have a sense of not being appreciated as an individual. Of course Asian people are all individuals, it's not fair to group what many people in the us would say that means (some kind of almost racist thing based on looks). I feel like I should point out again the ad also wasn't looking to hire someone like me (white male), and I never had a silicon valley internship, and no one from my undergrad school did either.

I have always heard and supported that we need more diversity. I think if I was Asian, I'd probably feel pretty pissed that the world seems to be trying to discriminate against me, for lots of reasons, among them that people should be treated as individuals. But I hope there's benefit in trying to encourage more people who aren't in the predominate groups.

It's hiring underrepresented groups, not minitories - Asians are a minority but are barred as well.

> offering the internship only to second-year students would be age discrimination

This is not true.

> offering it only to full-time college students would be discriminating against people who can't afford to attend college full-time

This is also not true.

IANAL, but it is only illegal to discriminate against protected classes. It is legal to discriminate against people without college degrees or aren't attending college, just as it is legal to discriminate against smokers, or people who can't code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

The description seems to exclude students with disabilities not matching the filter though.

> IANAL, but it is only illegal to discriminate against protected classes.

Age over 40 is a protected class, and anti-discrimination law protects not only against facially or intentionally discriminatory acts, but also against those with a disparate impact not sufficiently justified by business concerns (though the standard for that is weaker for age discrimination than other workplace discrimination.)

I agree with you on both points, but your comment has no supporting arguments. That's not a good way to discuss anything.

The person I replied to didn't provide any arguments or sources. I encourage him to do his own research before making ignorant, incorrect comments.

They very clearly made the argument that discriminating against older workers is illegal. They're wrong that a program encouraging students constitutes discrimination against older workers, but their post has some substance.

> offering it only to full-time college students would be discriminating against people who can't afford to attend college full-time

That's not a protected class though.

Now, in both the students of a particular year and full-time students case, you could argue race discrimination as well as age-over-40; both of these would be disparate impact rather than facial discrimination, of course. Race might be an easier case to make, because age-over-40 has a lower bar for business justification of disparate impact.

> I can't file an EEOC complaint because I wasn't discriminated against.

That's not quite true. I'd talk to a California employment law attorney, or a public interest law firm that might be interested in these facts.

> People working here seem morally fine with this sort of discrimination.

This is the bigger problem, but the nondiscrimination laws were passed precisely because some people felt morally fine with race discrimination.

To add to that, California's Unruh Civil Rights Act is broader than the US federal law, and the federal laws related to the EEOC don't require that complainant be the one that was discriminated against.

The laws against retaliation hold so long as you have a "reasonable good faith belief" that there may be a violation of the laws, and the court has a generous interpretation of that phrase. I'll quote from https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/litigation/briefs/jordan2.txt :

> ... an employee should be deemed protected from retaliation by §704(a) when he reports conduct by a coworker or supervisor which, if repeated often enough, would create a hostile work environment. Several courts have held such complaints protected, often by applying a generous standard in determining whether the plaintiff's belief was reasonable. See, e.g., Alexander, 40 F.3d at 195-96 (summarized supra at p. 11); Reed, 95 F.3d at 1174-80 (summarized supra at p. 11); Moyo v. Gomez, 40 F.3d 982, 985 (9th Cir. 1994) (black corrections officer believed prison's practice of allowing white inmates, but not black inmates, to shower after work shifts violated Title VII; he complained and was fired; court held that even if these inmates would not be considered employees for Title VII purposes, plaintiff's belief might still have been reasonable, and the district court accordingly erred in dismissing his claim); id. at 984 ("An erroneous belief that an employer engaged in an unlawful employment practice is reasonable, and thus actionable under § 704(a), if premised on a mistake made in good faith. A good-faith mistake may be one of fact or of law.") (emphasis in original); ... ("[P]laintiffs alleging retaliation are not required to possess a good faith, reasonable belief as to every legal element necessary to succeed on such a claim, and are instead held only to a ‘lay person's' understanding of the violation . . . . It is the Court's firm conviction that . . . the law should not leave unprotected those employees who experience retaliation for reports of what they believe reasonably and in good faith to be a violation of the law . . . .").

You can see that the corrections officer was protected from retaliation even though he himself was not the one being discriminated against.

But really, take Digory's advice and talk to someone with specific CA experience.

I am not a lawyer, take with a grain of salt.

You can discriminate all you want, even as an employer. You just can't do so against protected classes.

They are not discriminating against a protected class, they are discriminating against a non-protected class. Now, if they refused a candidate because of their sexual orientation or other protected class, then they would be violating the law

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