Legitimacy of the BFOQ Defense: An Analysis

Discrimination is illegal and should never form the basis for limiting people’s access to social amenities, education or employment. However, there are certain instances where discrimination can be justified. The bona fide occupational qualification defense is an aspect that makes discrimination legitimate but depends on the circumstances. BFOQ is a criterion that makes it legitimate for employers when hiring. The defense has to be legitimate in the sense that all those people discriminated and excluded from the employment opportunity have to lack the capacity to perform the job needed. A good example is a male modeling agency. Such an institution cannot hire female models because the businesses are tailored towards the development of male designs. As a result, the employer has a legitimate reason for discriminating against female models during hiring. The defense in this situation is that female model cannot wear male designs. In the case study, the Casual sports bar and restaurant works on the ideology that the use of female only employees is a theme that is beneficial for the businesses. The sex theme used by the business is used as the Bona fide occupational qualification and is locking out people of other sex from employment opportunities in the business.

Sex as an appeal has been used for many years, and businesses use it for the attraction of customers. It is also a factor greatly used in advertising. Sex uses imagery depicting women in scanty clothes and use of their nakedness for business promotion. In some cases, it is considered as one of the strongest, and sometimes the most effective tools used for selling of products and many businesses have arranged their operations and marketing campaigns in inclination towards the use of sex for marketing. Sex is not a recent invention and has, therefore, been used for generations with some of the largest brands in the world such as Calvin Klein have had great success thanks to the use of sex for advertising. Marketing through sex works based on underlying human factors of survival such as shelter food and mate which mostly relates to sex. The combination of these factors with our brains functions of emotions and logic makes sex very important factors of reasoning. This makes sex very important in advertising and most cases humans only respond to messages that imply about sex. For years studies have been developed in the fields of business and marketing to develop better ways of increasing sales and sex has developed to be great psychological aspects of the success of a business. It is for this reason that business creates sex as themes of operation and make them selling points for them.

The casual sports bar/restaurant is a great example of a business that capitalizes on the use of sex to drive sales. However, this business has capitalized on the female aspect of sex and left out the other genders. It has used this aspect as its qualification for hiring where it only hires female staff and leaves out the rest. This is a form of discrimination based on gender. According to the Bona fide Occupational Qualification, an employer has to have justification for the discrimination. This justification has to show that the other genders cannot perform the tasks and in this case, there is no clear justification because most of the employment opportunities in the restaurant can be carried out by both genders.