A bald trainee police officer has won a court case against the forces, after his application to join was rejected – on the grounds that he could not give a hair sample for a drugs test.
The man was at the advanced stages of the training process in Northern Ireland when the dilemma arose. Recruits were required to give hair samples from their head or alternatively 200 body hairs, so that DNA tests could be conducted for illegal drugs. The trainee in question was totally bald and could not provide this, so was informed that he could not join the police.
The police have now revised their recruitment system so that this does not happen again, and have made alternative means of drug testing available. As for the recruit, he has now been reinstated by the police.
Discrimination against bald men
It is rare that bald men face discrimination or differential treatment in the workplace. With one in two men going bald at some stage in their life, baldness, though considered to be embarrassing by some men, is actually remarkably common and there are very few cases where it has made a difference to people’s work life.
However in 2008 a school teacher, James Campbell from Stirlingshire, took his school to court, claiming that he had faced disability discrimination on grounds of his hair loss. The court ruled that his hair loss did not count as ‘discrimination’ and rejected the claim.
The teacher was not impaired from carrying out his role or impeded in any way by his employers, though he was taunted by his pupils about his baldness. Even the American Baldness Association commented that “had Mr Campbell not been bald, his pupils would probably have chosen some other weakness to exploit.”
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