“How Dumb Could They Be?” — Job Seekers Attack Posting That Asks for Only Male Applicants

Under the United States Government's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, "it is illegal to discriminate against someone (applicant or employee) because of that person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information."

This means that if you're actively hiring for a position, you can't write, "only hiring black women," or "only hiring Asian men," as these fall under the aforementioned guidelines as listed by the EEOC.

Now, if you and your pals who are hiring for the gig decide to, behind closed doors, onboard whoever you onboard based on any of these aforementioned qualifiers, then that's on you (and them).

But it's not like you're going to get in federal amounts of trouble for doing so, and if someone does suspect you're discriminating based on gender, sex, ethnicity, sexuality, or religious background, then they'll have to get to work on launching a formal investigation into you and your company for doing so.

You won't be doing yourself any favors as part of an EEOC investigation if you just so happened to write in a job posting that you're specifically only looking to hire candidates of a particular sex or gender.

This seems to be what happened with a Leewayhertz job posting for an IT Support Engineer that was summarily called out on both X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit.

MIT Mathematician Rona Wang called out the job posting in a viral post she uploaded to X, which included a screenshot of the "Requirements" and "Skills" needed for the IT Support Engineer Role based out of San Francisco, California.

Leewayhertz's posting said it was looking for the following:

• Immediate Joiner.
• Should have experience working in a development/software company.
• Work from the office only, Monday to Saturday.
• Only male candidates will be considered.
• Experience — 3-8 yrs
• Graduate in Computer Science / IT.
• Good knowledge of Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

Did you notice the fourth requirement listed as part of the job description? Now maybe it has something to do with the mounting number of violent physical and sexual assaults that women are experiencing in San Francisco in recent years due to the once beautiful city's rampant drug and homelessness epidemic that has the city in a chokehold whenever a dictator of a foreign nation isn't stopping by to visit.

Or maybe it's because Leewayhertz has overwhelmingly onboarded so many women into its company that it decided to even things out a bit by throwing some Y-chromosomes into the mix.

Whatever the reason for the job posting necessitating that qualified applicants must be male in order to be considered for the role, it's illegal, under Federal law, to do so.

And Rona, along with throngs of other X users, couldn't understand why a company would put that in a job posting; i.e. effectively advertising that they intended to commit discrimination when it comes to hiring for the gig.

Some people questioned the legitimacy of the job posting, with one X user highlighting how HTML could be edited for an end user to display any text that they want, suggesting that someone may have edited the HTML, taken a screenshot, and then fomented outrage online over said posting.

Rona pointed out that the job posting had been removed online, but then mentioned that there was a Redditor who also appeared to see the job posting as well, and they uploaded a screenshot of it to the site's r/recruitinghell sub where it accrued around 4,000 upvotes.

One commenter said that they saw the controversial line of text on the job posting itself and even provided a hyperlink to it. However, it seems that it's no longer active, leading many to believe it was deleted after a hullabaloo was created online by folks who saw the posting and began flaming the company online after picking their jaws up from off the floor.

So how could have such a massive gaffe occurred? One Redditor believes it was an AI-generated mistake: "Their website and entire business sounds like it was generated by ChatGPT. I googled the company and AI, web3, and blockchain were the first words I saw."

Someone else pointed out that calling for male-only applicants wasn't the only part of the posting that could've landed LeewayHertz in hot water: "Illegal to list a job with no salary in California. Tons of red flags here," they said.