Quebec university defends asking job candidates about menstruation, HIV status

[hobbits_friend]

MONTREAL - A Quebec City university is being criticized for a questionnaire that required job candidates to reveal whether they’ve been tested for HIV, the date they last menstruated and whether they’ve been treated for cancer.

Comments

[soleiltropiques]

Wow. I'm from Quebec myself, and I didn't hear about this until I read your post!

That's just terrible, wtf.

I also think it's pretty common, unfortunately, for employers to try to find out how likely a woman is to get pregnant while working for them, or if she is pregnant already... And for that to have consequences relative to their employment. It isn't supposed to work that way, but I remember one of my friends being fired when she got pregnant with her first child (this was in Ontario, another Canadian province).

Women don't complain in many cases (even after being fired), because it means being 'blackballed' and not being able to work in their area again. So employers (as in the case of my friend) routinely get away with this.

Employers will even ask women if they've already had children, in order to find out how likely they are to have to be absent during a pregnancy.

I'm hoping movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp will change things for the better for women in this area as well, but I won't hold my breath.

[hobbits_friend]

This was the only article about this that I could find (I always compare different articles before I post to find the most comprehensive one) and I only saw it in a comment at another comm somewhere I think.

In Austria it's not allowed to ask women if they want children (and if they ask you can lie to them).

[soleiltropiques]

Oh, it's not legal here either, but they do it anyway. I wonder, is there a better way of enforcing this in place in in Austria?

The problem here is that women don't dare complain in many cases, because of the consequences down the road in terms of employment. And it's not even just male employers, I've had female bosses who complained about employees taking maternity leave.

I wonder if what it would take is someone doing a report on this, with undercover cameras etc. Or a more long-term investigative news story of some kind. I think this needs to be brought to the fore, in this country at least (I hope it's better elsewhere!).

I actually found quite a few news stories on the University of Laval thing later, but they were all in French. It's funny (and a bit depressing) that French media in the country tends to cover mostly Quebec and English media tends to not cover Quebec as much (from what I've noticed anyway).