Religion and weight on your resume

Being in Thailand helps me appreciate the anti-disrimination and gender equality that we experience in the U.S. One of the nice things about living overseas is that you are valued simply because you speak English natively. While in a coffee-shop near Lumphini Park, I helped a 25-year-old girl get her resume ready for several job applications later this week. Instead of using a one-page resume, which is most common in the USA, she used the curriculum vitae format, which is basically the same thing except you get two pages to do your writing.

The most interesting part of the resume, I saw, was that she explicitly stated her personal information: height, weight, age, marriage status and religion. Puzzled, I asked her (Ying was her name) why she placed that information on the page. She replied that it was standard practice to include those personal details when applying for a job. I was quite surprised. Can you imagine a U.S. company insisting that you list your religion, weight and marriage status for an office job application? They would get sued left and right! What should marriage status, weight or height have to do with being a secretary at a company? To be fair, I suspect discrimination goes on in the States much like in Thailand. Rather than explicitly ask about religion, weight, height or marriage status, an American firm would simply get answers to all those questions during the first interview. Still, I would hope companies focus on skills and experience rather than on outward appearances.