Bona fide professional qualifications are necessary skills for a job and provide an exemption for employers from discrimination charges. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on religion, sex, race, age, and national origin, except when they are bona fide qualifications. Employers can require job applicants to meet other qualifications as long as they do not discriminate unlawfully.
Bona fide professional qualifications are skills, talents or attributes necessary to perform a job. They are a significant element of employment law in the United States because they provide an exemption for employers, in some cases, from unlawful discrimination charges. On the other hand, many job descriptions have been successfully challenged because they included discriminatory job requirements that weren’t bona fide professional qualifications.
Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers in the United States had wide latitude in defining the qualifications applicants had to meet when applying for a job. The most common qualifications were gender and race: employers often specified that applicants must be male or, in some cases, female. As for race, qualifications were more often exclusionary. Exclusions based on race were harder to spot because many employers wouldn’t bother to specify race in a job posting, but simply wouldn’t hire candidates who didn’t meet their qualifications.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination on the grounds of religion, sex, race, age, and national origin, except when they constituted bona fide professional qualifications. Thus, employers advertising for secretaries or accountants could no longer specify that only female applications would be considered, just as nursing would no longer be limited to women. The rule goes beyond gender and race, though. For example, a religious organization may require its clergy to be members of its denomination and may extend that requirement to teachers in its school as well. However, it cannot impose such a requirement on janitors or cleaning staff, because their ability to do their job would not be affected by whether they belong to one religion or another.
Under certain circumstances, age discrimination is also permitted. Airlines are able to impose a statutory retirement age on their pilots because they have been able to demonstrate that with age they have lost some of the qualities that made them good pilots when they were younger, such as reaction time when emergency, stamina and visual acuity. They are no longer allowed, however, to impose such requirements on their flight attendants as gender, height, weight and even marital status. There are bona fide job requirements in some public safety jobs as well. For example, physical disabilities are generally grounds for rejecting applicants for many law enforcement and fire department jobs, and departments offering such jobs are permitted to impose upper age requirements where they are generally prohibited in most others. occupations.
Entertainment is another area where bona fide professional qualifications can violate discrimination laws. Advertising agencies, for example, can be quite specific in defining qualifications when hiring models, and theater and film companies can hire actors who conform to character descriptions. Professional and academic sports leagues may also discriminate on the basis of gender.
Therefore, an employer can list any requirement for a job, but if they violate the law, the employer must be prepared to demonstrate that they are bona fide professional qualifications in terms of actually performing the job. This constitutes a comprehensive defense to allegations of discriminatory hiring. On the other hand, employers may require job applicants to meet other qualifications that have nothing to do with performing the job, as long as they do not discriminate unlawfully. An employer may therefore require that applicants for clerical positions have a college degree or that all applicants undergo credit checks, even if it goes without saying that they have nothing to do with performing the job competently.
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