am I not getting hired because I still wear a mask?

A reader writes:

After losing my job six months ago, I have been on the hunt. It has … not been very successful. I have pivoted to expand beyond my industry and include my ever constant fallback of restaurant work. Everything I do and have been trained in is in public-facing customer service.

I also mask. It’s personal and nobody asks about it, but after so long my family seems to believe that it is because I am masking that I am not getting anywhere.

While I am no lawyer, I feel at this point it falls into disability/perceived disability discrimination, but to quote my family, “It’s only discrimination if they tell you about it.”

I want to work. I want to get back to helping people. Do I risk physical and mental distress for this? Am I the problem?

It’s possible that it’s the masking.

It shouldn’t be; in an ideal world, the assumption would be that if you’re masking, you have a private medical reason for it (for example, that you’re immunocompromised and need to be especially careful). But it’s also true that now that most people don’t mask, it may bias some interviewers against you, either consciously or unconsciously — whether that’s feeling like they’re not “connecting” with you as well when they can’t see your face or because they have Feelings about people who mask in general. And there are people who weren’t virulently anti-mask a few years ago but find it weird now that most people have stopped.

Still, though, if you’re going to mask on the job, you might as well screen out employers who will have a problem with it up-front.

It might go over better if you acknowledge it in some way. “Apologies for the mask, I’m being careful right now” or “Apologies for the mask, I still need to be careful” are both true and don’t give much away as far as private medical info, but provide some context. (Obviously you don’t need to apologize for taking a medical precaution; this would be a social nicety to acknowledge that there is a barrier preventing them from seeing your face.)

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