Hijab or hoodie? HSBC bank pictogram causes confusion
Murielle Salari’s husband couldn’t quite tell how he felt about it at first — other than it seeming a little odd — so he pulled out his phone, snapped a photo and sent it to his wife.
“What do you make of this?” he asked her last Monday. The photo was of a pictogram Salari’s husband, a non-practising Muslim, noticed in the window of an HSBC Canada branch on St-Martin Blvd. in Laval.
The pictogram shows three images that are meant to depict the bank’s dress code for customers, which is enforced for security reasons: no hats, no hoods, and no sunglasses. But that’s not how Salari, 61, interpreted one of them.
“To me, very definitely, it doesn’t look like a hoodie,” she said. “It looks like a hijab, and that doesn’t make any sense.”
The pictogram is accompanied by text underneath, only in French, stating “thank you for removing hats, hoods and sunglasses.”
“But for anyone walking by, if they don’t read French, it’s going to look like a hijab,” Salari said, recalling recent political debates over religious clothing in Quebec.
To properly represent a hoodie, she feels, the image should become wider around the person’s neck — “nobody wears a hoodie that tight around their face” — and possibly show pull strings.
“The point is that this is Canada and we’re supposed to be an allinclusive country,” she said. “As a society, we have to be careful about how we word things and how we depict things.”
Contacted about the pictograms, an HSBC Canada spokesperson said they’re used in the bank’s branches across Canada, were created by a professional designer and have been in place for at least a few years. This is the first time they’ve been brought to the company’s attention.
As a result, spokesperson Aurora Bonin said, the bank has started the process of removing and replacing them with a clearer graphic across its network.
“In no way, shape, or form would we ever discriminate against any customer or employee based on religion or faith,” Bonin said. “We would never request that a client, customer or anyone remove their hijab in our branches.”
Bonin said it was never the bank’s intention for the pictogram to be interpreted the way Salari did, but that she understood how some people could see it that way.
The pictogram “could be better and has to be better,” Bonin added. “We apologize for any confusion or misinterpretation.”