The path to the perfect Hooters Girl has been paved with discrimination. For forty years, Hooters’ image and brand has been singularly tied to its waitresses. These servers are almost always thin, pretty, young women. Though Hooters’ central menu item is its chicken wings, the majority of the restaurant’s website and branding surrounds not wings, but “Hooters Girls,” clad in their signature uniform (orange shorts and a low-cut white tank top). A company’s dependency on the sex appeal of waitresses necessitates fixating on attractiveness and desirability. This focus can and does devolve into racist stereotyping and sexually hostile work environments. Wealthy corporations get away with a lot, and Hooters is no exception. By pricing in illegal discrimination, the company avoids accountability, while inadvertently revealing the limits of contemporary employment law.
Making a Hooters Girl
For decades, the Hooters franchise has been under scrutiny for discrimination claims. In 1997, a group of men sued Hooters for its practice of hiring exclusively female servers. The restaurant asserted that being female was a Bona Fide Occupational Qualification (BFOQ), an exception to Title VII that allows for sex discrimination based on business necessity. BFOQ arguments frequently arise in the entertainment industry, and have been interpreted narrowly. The crux of the company’s argument was that Hooters waitresses are not merely waitresses, but entertainers, inextricable from the Hooters...
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