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As an ophthalmologist, one of the things I do for a living is screen people for colour blindness. These people that I screen are applying to join a particular company. I usually do the colour vision test with the standard Ishihara colour plates. These are colour plates in a booklet, made up of coloured blobs like here.
The other day a young man came in for screening. He passed the colour test, but raised our suspicions. Now, I personally have always been doubtful of the value of the Ishihara test when there is a motivation to pass it. Well, it turns out I was right to be so, because after further scrutiny it turned out that he was colour blind after all. He had tried to pass the test by memorising the patterns in the booklet that a person with normal vision sees. He had done a pretty thorough job at it, because his employment with an excellent company was at stake, and getting good work in India is tough. While I was sad at having to fail him, it was obviously my duty to do this for the company.
It raised some moral questions in my mind. As a doctor my conscience requires that I be ethically on solid ground. So, my actions should always be based on reasons (ie not excuses), and overall benefit to society (ie not necessarily to individuals). So I thought carefully about the rights and wrongs of this case, along with the consequences and might-have-beens. I decided to write my thoughts on the matter down here as a record for the future.
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Firstly, was the company right in imposing a colour test?
Well, yes. They can put whatever restrictions they like on who they want to employ. They have every right to do so. That said, there are two things that make the colour vision restriction somewhat unfair.
- It is a surprise disqualification after the first stage of recruitment. The company should have made it clear at the first stage of recruitment that it was a necessary requirement that the applicant have full colour vision. About 8% of of applicants were colour blind enough to fail the test, many of whom were previously unaware that they were colour blind. Since most people restrict how many companies they apply for during recruitment, 8% of applicants lost a chance to join this company at a stage that can be devastating to planning their future.
- Colour blindness is not a major disability. So it is illogical to turn away colour blind people unless full colour vision is a critical part of the job. Some illustrative examples:
- Airline pilots or train drivers certainly need to be able to discern colour because it can be a matter of life or death.
- For an artist or designer, it is not a matter of life or death, but they'd have a hard time earning a living.
- Electricians can actually get away with mild colour blindness because they can see the difference in wire colours, and if they are having problems (eg under coloured lights) they can ask a colleague about wire colours. And when in doubt, they can use a multimeter.
- In electronics, a colour blind person can have trouble telling the difference between green and red LEDs, or working out resistor values from the colours painted on it. But it can be worked around by, eg, testing with multimeters, or reading the labels. It is probably a bit safer to disregard the colours in such cases.
- Then there are the vast majority of professions in which colourblindness is no big deal - eg programming, which is what this company mostly does.
- And, finally, there are also some cases in which colourblind people do better than people with normal vision - eg some can see through camouflage better than normal sighted people, and their night vision tends to be better than normal sighted people.
So unless there are very good reasons, a person who has the most common kind of colour blindness functions as well as a normal vision person for most jobs in my opinion.
- Secondly, was the person being screened wrong in trying to subvert the system?
Yes. It could have compromised my reputation, and the reputation of the place that I am working for. We have worked hard to get the good reputation that we have. As a result, if we say something, people value what we have said because they trust us. Any damage to this reputation wrongs us, and is unacceptable to us.
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Thirdly, whose loss is it really?
The person showed remarkable initiative and gall in his attempt to beat the system. That is a valuable asset. He was also a hard worker and desperate to get accepted and do well, since he came from a disadvantaged background. His behaviour was to some extent understandable.
Unfortunately all this came together with a disregard of our reputation, and with dishonesty towards the company that required the screening.
From a practical point of view, this sort of gumption probably actually makes him ideal material for grooming into becoming a company director in the Indian business environment - he would be alert and agile enough to bend the rules enough without truly breaking them to keep his company in the lead. Successful Indian companies are not saintly in their behaviour, and do best when led by gutsy people like this. So, while his behaviour was unethical, and something I disapprove of, I think (again from a practical point of view) it worked out to be a loss on the part of the company that was putting him through the screening. I think he will benefit any company he joins, despite him having done a wrong thing like this.
So, what would the right thing to do have been? The right thing, according to my way of thinking, would have been for him to calmly talk to the company about their rejection policy, pointing out that he was not informed about this requirement at the time he got to apply to them (of note is that he rejected other offers in favour of this company because he was unaware about his colourblindness and the colourblindness restriction). He would almost certainly have been rejected anyway. But maybe he would have impressed them enough by his reasoning that they would take him on regardless.
In any case, it would have been the right thing to do and better in the long run.
