[UPDATE on Dec. 11: adding comments from TAFEP spokesperson]

Living in multicultural Singapore, employers are not supposed to recruit their employees on the basis of race.

Unfortunately, it looks like discrimination in the tuition sector is still happening in Singapore — prospective tutors continue to be rejected by parents of students on the sole basis of their race.

Innocuous-looking Gumtree ad, but single-line rejection

In response to a tuition ad posted on listing site Gumtree, one Singaporean woman messaged the user enquiring if the position was still available.

This is the pretty innocuous-looking ad, with certain identifying information redacted:

In her message, which she initially shared on a public Facebook post but eventually took down and shared a screenshot of with Mothership, she indicated her qualifications as well as prior teaching experience — having taught at the Primary level for 9 years, and has a Master's degree in International Relations from the UK.

According to the Tripartite alliance for fair and progressive employment practices (TAFEP)'s job advertisement guidelines, job ads should not feature statements which indicate racial preferences (e.g. "Chinese preferred").

A TAFEP spokesperson told us that the regulations above don't cover employer-private tutor relationships, but did not know if the organisation had any that did.

Even though the ad did not violate the guidelines, the tutor received the following one-liner rejection:

"Chinese tutor prefer sorry."

No reference was made to the applicant's qualifications or her teaching experience, so it appears she was rejected on the sole basis of her race (which happens to be Indian) without further explanation.

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Here's the message exchange she shared with Mothership:

Why is this happening?

It is understandable that parents may seek specific tutors for specific needs that they might have. For instance, a specific language proficiency might be a requirement.

According to TAFEP, if a certain language proficiency is required, the job advertisement must either be in the language of the advertising medium, or provide justifications which are job-related.

For instance, Chinese-speaking families who cannot speak English might prefer tutors who are fluent in Chinese for ease of communication and building of a good working relationship between the parent and the tutor.

If that is the case, however, this requirement and its associated reasoning should be stated clearly in the ad. This also bears in mind an important distinction between ethnicity (being Chinese) and language proficiency (being able to speak Chinese).

Given that this job advertisement was posted by a user who posted several other listings for students seeking tutors (we found a number of others listed by the same user), it is also possible that the racial preference expressed by the parent of the prospective student, and not her own.

However, it is still unclear why race was given as the sole reason for turning the applicant down.

When we reached out to the Gumtree user to find out the reason why she might have turned the applicant down, we received a read notification but no response.

The umpteenth time this has happened

And sadly, this isn't the first time something like this has happened.

In January 2017, an undergrad part-time tutor was rejected by an agency due to "racial preferences" despite being qualified enough for the job:

And in March 2017, a babysitter was turned down because she was not Chinese. The conversation with the babysitter also revealed inherently racist stereotypes:

The recurrence of such incidences exposes a deep-seated problem in Singapore's society.

Even though multiculturalism is a fundamental principle in Singapore, not everyone is being treated equally — regardless of race.

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Top photo adapted from Getty Images.