Article Image

IPFS News Link • Employee and Employer Relations

The strange loophole that lets Hooters hire only female servers

• Business Insider

It's pretty obvious: They're all women. Hooters doesn't hire any men as servers.

The practice flies in the face of conventional job-hiring: Based on the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discriminatory hiring is supposed to be illegal, right? A man has the right to be a Hooters server if he wants to, so the thinking goes.

That's just what a few men thought in 1997. They were turned down by Hooters for server jobs and filed two lawsuits that were eventually combined into a class-action lawsuit in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune reported at the time.

Hooters settled the litigation for $3.75 million and agreed to open up some "gender-neutral" positions to men, according to the Tribune. Hooters did not agree to let men work as servers, and it had a legitimate legal argument for refusing to do so.


AzureStandard