Sir: Councillor Peter D Johnston argues that the careers teacher who was suspended for sex discrimination after advising his male students to wear smart suits and his female students to wear neat dresses when attending job interviews deserved his fate (BEN June 12). Most people would, I feel sure, say that the type of attire to be worn by interviewees depended on the job that was being sought but in general the advice tendered by the teacher was good.
But even assuming that the advice was bad, as Cllr Johnston maintains, surely suspension for such a minor peccadillo is excessive and a friendly word of advice would have been a far more fitting response.
As we have seen from the above, a politically-correct person seems incapable of matching the punishment with the "crime", thus we see good people getting suspended for "Political Incorrectness" while muggers of pensioners, for example, get to play with computer games and then get sent on foreign holidays at the taxpayers' expense. This is hardly an incentive for the mugger to mend his ways.
A recent scientific discovery suggests that men are genetically programmed to be more aggressive than women, while women are more caring than men, so it would appear that jobs can have a sex bias after all. This will not come as a surprise to most people, except those of the "Politically Correct' persuasion in our Teacher Training Colleges, but, as I said in my first letter to this column, when it comes to a clash of interest between "Political Correctness" and scientific integrity, PC always wins.
James Marshall Bridge
Tomlin Square, Bolton
Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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