Report: Minorities, women not equal at eateries

3/31/09
restaurant
By Marlene Naanes

Report: Minorities, women not equal at eateries

By Marlene Naanes

Scoring a job at a Manhattan restaurant can be extra hard for minorities and women, and white people with slight European accents might have it easiest of all, according to a study released yesterday.

White restaurant job applicants are twice as likely to get a job offer after an interview while women earn 22 percent less than men, according to the study by the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York.

“Discrimination occurs at all stages of hiring for workers of color and women…from the hiring stage to promotion and sexual harassment,” said Rekha Eanni, co-executive director of the group said.

What’s more, the study found that an applicant’s accent also played into the chances of being hired. White people with slight European accents were 23 percent more likely to be hired than white applicants with no accent.

The three-year study probed Manhattan fine dining restaurants, sending in pairs of applicants to 138 eateries. Interviews, census data and other data rounded out the study’s findings, which included wage disparities for women, immigrants and other minorities.Workers of color earn about 12 percent less than their white counterparts, and citizenship status also affected wages. The industry also suffers from a “culture of informality,” which sometimes allowing women’s chances at certain jobs—or being hired at all—to be reliant on their looks, Eanni said.

Chantal Georges, a woman who has worked in the industry for seven years, said one restaurant she worked at often took looks or age into consideration.

“In this restaurant, age and looks for women became a blessing or a curse,” said Georges, who also works with the organization that released the study.

Andrew Rigie, director of operations of the New York State Restaurant Association’s greater New York City chapters, said that inequality is not intrinsic to the restaurant industry.

“Any inequality is too much, but we stand by the restaurant industry—especially in New York City—that allows upward mobility of people of any background,” he said.

The association offers seminars on sexual harassment and hiring and firing practices, and also offers expert consultants and Spanish-language classes, he said.
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Report: Minorities, women not equal at eateries

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