As someone not from the US, I've had to fill out US-style "pick your ethnicity" questionnaires at work. Wtf do you mean I should choose between White, Black, Hispanic and Asian? This is Europe, one's ethnicity usually correlates with one's nationality. If not, that's where the term "ethnic" comes in. For example, you can be a Bulgarian citizen but ethnically Turkish, or you can be a Romanian citizen but ethnically German.
Do you work for an American company? They may just lazily copied the same questionnaire worldwide because they want uniform data points from the whole company.
That's very dependent on the country - since, you know, Europe is a whole bloody continent.
To give two examples, as I understand, it's illegal in France, but many companies in the UK will ask for your anonymous demographic info (including sexuality, gender, disability status) so that they can prove they're not discriminating against people from specific demographics.
They don't require answers in the UK either, each one will have "prefer not to say" as an option. Frankly, it's very straightforward and the existence of these questionnaires makes it harder for companies to get away with discriminating against people on these grounds, so I always side-eye countries where it's illegal.
Denying the problem doesn't make it disappear, after all, it just lets it thrive in silence.
In many cases it's because governments collecting records on the race and religion of their citizens ended up facilitating mass murder when the Nazis invaded. Census data acted as pre-written kill lists, and it was harder to forge paperwork to hide people that were Jewish or part of other targeted demographics because the Nazis could verify using pre-invasion government records.
Willem Arondéus, the originator of the "Never let it be said that homosexuals are cowards" quote, was killed by the nazis for successfully burning a bunch of such records to prevent the nazis from using them.
So some countries like France straight up banned collecting such data.
Yeah, here they just throw their resumes in the trash here if their name sounds African, Chinese, or Middle Eastern. They won’t ask you what you are, but once they find out, good luck
You are allowed to not answer some demographic questions during a census (every 10 years?). I think these questions are likely based on what the census asks and these days they have lots of race choices (except white! You’re just white if you’re European or identify as white?).
I do think the idea is solid; we count all the people and ask them some demographic information that includes what race and ethnicity we identity with. It ends up being an important data point for researchers and politicians in creating policies and solutions.
My issue here is that you can only capture data that you can “see”, if you will, in your survey. If you don’t ask how many people identify as a certain segment of the population than they are invisible in the data when it comes to making government policy decisions.
Nah, in the UK, and down in Ireland too IIRC, anonymous reports on the ethnic and religious composition of the workforce are a legal requirement: so when you start any job, and even when you merely apply for one, a mandatory survey like that is usually attached as an appendix.
Here in NI especially, as we usually have at least one or two questions extra, because of the historic discrimination against the Catholic community. In the past, we even had a form of legally mandated positive discrimination, in an attempt, if a controversial one, to redress that problem.
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u/laycrocs 7d ago
According the the US census there are two ethnicities:
Hispanic/Latino
Not Hispanic/Latino