A young woman stands in Westfield White City, a shopping centre in London, waiting to speak to someone from a recruitment agency. She is holding a printed CV. She has rehearsed three answers. The recruiter is on the phone. The woman waits. The recruiter finishes the call and gestures: come forward. The woman steps up. The recruiter looks at the CV, looks at her face, and says: “Do you have your own transport?” The woman does not. The recruiter moves the CV to the left side of the desk. Interview over. Twelve seconds.
I watched this happen in April 2024 at a different job fair, in Birmingham. Not Westfield. A smaller venue. Same setup: booths arranged in rows, each with a banner, each with someone sitting behind a folding table deciding in real time who gets moved forward. The young woman I watched did not know she had been rejected. She thought the recruiter was still reading. She stood there for another forty seconds before someone touched her shoulder and pointed toward the exit aisle.
I design interfaces. I build information systems that route people through decisions. I have sat in the room where someone explains that candidates are rejected before seeing the job description, before submitting the form, before anyone has to say no. The system says no. The system is fair because it applies the same logic to everyone. That is the claim. The logic is: if you cannot drive, you cannot work.
Maya Flux wrote recently about care work timed in fifteen-minute increments. She is right that the hour has become the injury. Here is where we split: her injury is documentable. Mine is not. She can point to the timesheet and say: look, they allocated twelve minutes for something that takes twenty. I point to the form and say: look, the dropdown menu does not have my language in it. Her employer stole time. Mine stole the ability to name what was stolen.
The job fair operates the same way. The question is not “are you qualified?” The question is “do you fit the infrastructure we already built?” And the infrastructure was designed by people who assume everyone hears the phone ring, everyone owns a car, everyone lives within Zone 3 on the London Underground rail system map. If you do not, the system filters you out before anyone has to make a decision that feels like discrimination.
Maya’s people are surviving impossible conditions. The young woman at Westfield is trying to enter a market that has already built a wall around itself. Different rooms. Different stakes. But the mechanism is the same. Someone designed a system that looks neutral. Someone else lives inside the gap between what the system claims to measure and what it actually filters for.
The recruiter who asked about transport probably did not think of himself as discriminatory. He was following instructions. The job requires site visits. Site visits require a car. No car, no job. The logic holds. What he did not ask: can you get there? Because that would require him to imagine a route that is not the one he takes. The Tube exists. Buses exist. Taxis exist. But if the job description says “must have own vehicle,” those routes disappear from the interface.
I sat in a business meeting about selecting contractors once. A contract manager said: “We are not excluding anyone. We are just describing the role accurately.” The role, as described, required someone to respond to client emails within two hours. It required attending in-person meetings with one day’s notice. It required answering phone calls during business hours. Deaf applicants could do all of this with adjustments. The contract manager knew that. But the job description did not say “and we will make adjustments.” It said “must be available by phone.”
What makes a career prestigious, according to research from the 1960s, is not the salary. It is the autonomy. The ability to set your own schedule. The ability to make decisions without someone timing you. The recruiter at Westfield has that. The young woman in the queue does not. She is waiting to be told whether she fits.
There is a building in Rotterdam designed by Aldo van Eyck. It opened in 1960. It is a children’s home. Van Eyck designed it so that every room has two doors. Not for fire safety. For choice. A child who does not want to walk past the staff office can take the other route. The architecture assumes that autonomy matters more than surveillance.
The job fair is the opposite. One entrance. One route. One queue. You walk through row by row, booth by booth, and at each stop someone makes a decision about you in less time than it takes to read a CV. The architecture is designed for filtering, not for choice. The filtering is not happening in some hidden server room. It is happening in public, in front of everyone, and nobody calls it what it is.
The young woman I watched in Birmingham finally left. She did not know she had been rejected. She thought she had been polite and the recruiter had been busy and maybe she would hear back later. She will not. The CV is already in the recycling bin. The system worked exactly as designed.
I have built systems like this. Not for job fairs. For museums. For archives. For institutions that wanted to make information accessible to Deaf visitors. The system worked. It logged every interaction. It tracked who used what feature and for how long. It generated reports. The reports were useful. The surveillance was invisible. I knew what I had built. I built it anyway because the alternative was no access at all. That is not a defence. That is just what happened.
The question is not whether the system discriminates. It does. The question is whether the people who built it believe their own description of what it measures. The recruiter believes he is filtering for reliability. The contract manager believes she is describing the role accurately. I believed I was improving access. All of us were designing infrastructure that works perfectly for the people it was built to include and excludes everyone else before they can even see the filter.
The young woman is still carrying that CV.