How did that Randy Newman song go? “Well, I don’t want no
short people/’Round here…”
Volvo’s Sweden division has been convicted by the Sweden Labor Court of gender discrimination and ordered to
pay the equivalent of $5,200 to a woman who was denied a job at a plant because she was too short to work on an
assembly line. How their legal department missed that one, we have no clue. Evidently the gap between denying
someone a job for being too short to denying someone a job because she’s a woman was bridged by
calling it “indirect gender discrimination.”
According to the plant’s hiring policy, employees must be between 5’5″ and 6’5″ to work on the assembly line, and
the court ruled that since this excluded more women than men, it was gender discrimination.