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IBM Apologizes For Racial Slurs On Its Recruitment Webpages (theregister.co.uk)
The Register: IBM has apologized after its recruitment webpages asked applicants whether their ethnicity was, among other options, the racial slurs Yellow and Mulatto. In online application forms for positions within the US tech giant, in among other questions ranging from military veteran status, and eligibility to work in America, a bizarre drop-down menu asked whether jobseekers were Caucasian, Black, or Indigenous, as well as the aforementioned insults. The Register was first alerted to the baffling error on Monday by an engineer who tried to apply for a technical role at IBM earlier this month, and was stunned by the slurs listed for a mandatory input field labeled: "Please state your ethnic group."
Chances are they've got federal contracts, and the feds like to force the inclusion of the question (along with veteran and disability status) all of which are optional for the candidate to specify. Should the company be accused of discrimination related to any of those categories WRT hiring, suddenly you've data avalible as to who applied and you can do your statistical analysis.
I'm from Europe, not from Armenia, Georgia or Azerbaijan
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Yeah, the answer to what happened is right there in the article, the page was created by or for Brazilians, where ethnicity = skin colour. The category "yellow" is a direct translation of amarelo, which is how Asians describe themselves in Brazil. So it's something that's the norm in Brazil where the page/code presumably came from, but less so in translation into English.