6 Bizarre Forms of Discrimination That Can Lose You a Job

Wrong. You may have a long list of degrees, experience in the industry and a reference from the president himself, but that might all count for squat if you work for one of the many companies around the world (including 3,000 in the UK alone) who hire graphologists.

According to those who study graphology, the way you write could indicate anything from your ability to solve problems in a group, to your likelihood of murdering your neighbor. According to science, this is not even close to true.

None of this has stopped believers from making incredibly important decisions based on handwriting analysis. If you think the company you work for would never do such a thing, keep in mind that they don't even need to let you know they're doing it, and because they probably know how crazy it sounds, they often don't.

The amount of information they think they can get on you from your handwriting is astounding. Hell, some graphologists even advertise the ability to catch cheating spouses. That's right, you can pay someone a ridiculous amount of money to analyze that sexually explicit note your girlfriend wrote to the gardener, and they'll tell you whether the way she crosses her T's indicates unfaithful tendencies.

Graphologists claim to have near foolproof methods to determine who's an alcoholic, who will be violent, who will steal and, in one especially bizarre case, a graphologist actually offered to identify potential child molesters working within the school simply by studying writing samples.

Add that to your cheat-sheet for a successful job interview: dress neatly, do your research and for Christ sakes make sure your handwriting isn't too rapey.

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The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is one of the more common personality tests in the field. It's a multiple-choice test filled with a bunch of personal questions ("When making a decision, is it more important to you to weigh the facts or consider people's feelings and opinions?") that as many as 30 percent of American companies are using it to screen employees.

Oh, and it doesn't work at all. In one particular study, it was found that around 50 percent of those who take the test more than once get assigned a different personality type every time. While it's possible that this means there are as many multiple-personality sufferers out there as Hollywood would like you to believe, it's much more likely that these tests are about as reliable as tea leaves.

And there's no telling what kind of outlandish questions assessors may put on your test. The respected personality testing firms claim to rely on proven scientific methods (you know, the science of turning complex human beings into graphs and Venn diagrams). And even they admit that the business is mostly unregulated.

That means that one second you could be asked a vague question relating to your views and opinions on kittens wearing hats and the next, BAM! You're tagged as a potential rapist and end up writing comedy on the Internet instead.

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That's why in a study done by the University of North Texas, people with Californian and Minnesotan accents were considered by far the most intelligent speakers, while people from Georgia and New Jersey were considered the least intelligent, despite the fact that all speakers were required to speak the same lines.

God help you if you're from New Jersey - they rank the lowest in all categories except one: they're perceived as exceptionally laid back. There's pretty much no occupation in the universe for which that counts as a plus. In business lingo, "Laid Back" is one unkempt beard away from "Laid Off."

The university took this study so seriously that it actually hired a non-Texan to record their voicemail so they could sound smarter, because when a Texan asks you to leave your name and number, all that an outsider hears is a rant about guns and gay marriage.

Likewise, the above study mentions a case where a woman was congratulated by coworkers for sounding smarter during a presentation after she altered her accent, as if ordinarily they could only picture her in a cowgirl costume, talking about business trends from atop a mechanical bull.

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Bura-Hara is the Japanese practice of discrimination by blood-type. It's based on the myth that your blood-type determines your personality, proving again that people will spare no expense thinking up new ways to groundlessly wedge large tracts of society into a tiny box. Folks with type-O, they say, are more likely to be energetic and social, while type-B are just selfish, whiny jerks. Just like most of the new-age gibberish that passes through Oprah's book club, the appeal is in how scientific it sounds to the layperson.

While most people may only consider blood-type profiling to be just another horoscope novelty, it is becoming an increasingly popular way to discriminate against others. Even politicians, including the former prime minister, feel the need to state their type. Additionally, kindergartens are being split up based on blood-type, as are dating services. Perhaps worse, job seekers are now being asked their blood-type during their interviews. If you want to get a job in Japan, you really don't want to have type-B blood.

Of course, the whole thing's deeply rooted in Nazi ideology. When Hitler started trying to breed a master race, his allies absorbed some of the Nazis' extremely feeble grasp of science. The notion that blood-types determined personalities died out after the war... until the 1970s, when it was brought back into vogue by some absolute nobody who everyone decided to listen to for some reason. We're guessing he was type-B.

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It's so bad that, for some reason, we imagine nasty people like Napoleon to have been really short, even though that's totally not true. And as some studies have already found, taller people are approximately 73 percent more likely to land a job when they're up against a shorter, but similarly qualified, applicant. This may also help explain why shorter people tend to earn less than taller people. It's estimated that shorter people earn around $800 less per inch per year.

As Volvo found, heightism and sexism can be rolled into one big discrimination extravaganza. A Volvo factory applied a minimum height requirement of 163 centimeters for all their workers. Not only did this get rid of all those pesky short people, but because this knocks out only one percent of the male population but a whopping 25 percent of the female population, it gets rid of all those pesky women too.

Also, in China, it's fairly common procedure to set height requirements for ordinary jobs. Also, they have a midget theme park there. So, there's that.

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For a pseudo-science that's only survived because editors feel a need to fill the last page of the newspaper with more than just comics, it should go without saying that astrology is an utterly useless way of hiring people. But of course, that's such a Pisces thing to say.

India, for example, is crazy about it. The Indian Council of Astrological "Sciences" reports a growing trend in employers hiring astrology consultants to help them decide who to employ and who to fire. The best thing about this job is that you get to reap a fabulous paycheck for writing a bunch of gibberish like "If Mars is in the third house suspected by Moon and Mercury, one has a tendency to betray those who believe in him." Who is going to dispute that? Are you going to argue with science?

Austria goes a step further. Just last year, an Austrian company decided to hire people born under only five certain astrology signs. According to a spokesperson, it's not like they're a bunch of superstitious nuts; they're just using "the same scientific methodology for making their choices that medical researchers and sociologists routinely use all the time without any dispute or controversy whatsoever." There's that magic word again: science. It makes the most outlandish claims seem suddenly reasonable.

And how did the government react? They shrugged their shoulders and decided it's all above board. It's only a little bit of discrimination, after all, and besides, it's not like they've ever let someone's own crazy prejudices get out of control before. Wait, was it Hitler or Charlie Chaplin who was born in Austria?

See more from Robin at gunaxin.com

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