Jack Dorsey Won't Say Whether He'll Be Twitter's Permanent CEO

Jack Dorsey refused on Friday to say whether he would stay on permanently as Twitter’s chief executive.

The company's chairman and co-founder -- who will take over as interim CEO on July 1 when Dick Costolo steps down -- dodged questions about whether he would consider keeping the job.

“I’m not going to answer that question because it’s not what I’m focused on,” he said during an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box." “My job is to make sure we continue without cadence and amplify.”

Dorsey, who served as the first of Twitter’s three CEOs so far, already holds the top spot at Square, a mobile payment company he founded in 2009. When Twitter announced on Thursday that Costolo -- pilloried by investors over the company’s weak financial performance and slowing user growth -- would move into a boardroom role, Dorsey said he would lead a team to find the next chief executive. Some floated Adam Bain, the company’s head of revenues, as a likely contender.

But Dorsey told analysts on Thursday evening that he and the three other board members helming the search committee had not yet retained a headhunting firm to look for candidates.

That may be, as Business Insider’s Henry Blodget suggests, because Twitter plans to have Dorsey return permanently. The interim period could serve as a trial run and allow Dorsey to slowly exit some of his other responsibilities, perhaps even his C-suite job at Square, Blodget wrote.

Square spokeswoman Colleen Murray referred The Huffington Post to a press release in which Dorsey says he "will continue to lead" the company. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

But Dorsey’s beard seemed to distract viewers from the question of Twitter’s future. His scraggly facial hair quickly became a trending topic on -- take a guess -- Twitter.

Jack Dorsey looks like Serj Tankian from @systemofadown pic.twitter.com/aIVu0MNtby

— Immortan Dave (@redletterdave) June 12, 2015

After a commercial break, CNBC’s David Faber asked whether the beard symbolized something about Dorsey's leadership style. Dorsey laughed and said he hadn't been expecting that question.

“People shouldn’t be measured by what they look like,” he said.

That seems to be a philosophy he has carried with him from his years, lest anyone forget his nose ring and spiky blue hair.

This post has bee updated with a comment from Square.

Focusing On Women's Advancement Blinds Companies To Their Real Problem: Overworking Everyone

By focusing on “women’s issues,” professional firms are in denial about their real problem: a culture of unnecessary, 24/7 work that makes everyone miserable.

Those are the findings of an exhaustive 18-month case study of one prestigious global consulting firm, reported in a yet-to-be published paper from Harvard’s Gender Initiative program that was recently shared with The Huffington Post.

The paper blasts away at two closely held gender stereotypes. One portrays mothers as more invested in family responsibilities than their work roles. Another assumes working fathers are fully committed breadwinners, free from the pull of family life.

The researchers found that these assumptions held women back in their careers, prevented men from finding more balance and kept the firm from understanding that everyone struggles when working long hours -- not just females.

There’s a myth that “women can’t do it, but men can. That’s not true,” said Robin Ely, a co-author on the paper and a professor at Harvard Business School who chairs the Gender Initiative.

“Virtually everyone -- women and men alike -- suffered from the competing pulls of work and family,” Ely and researchers Irene Padavic of Florida State University and Erin Reid of Boston University wrote in a summary of the paper.

The unnamed consulting firm reached out to Ely, who is known for her research on gender in the workplace, out of frustration. Despite efforts to put more flexible policies in place, women weren’t advancing. Ninety percent of partners and 63 percent of junior associates were men. The number of years it took to reach partnership were fewer for men than women.

Ely and her co-researchers interviewed 107 consultants and five human resource staffers at the firm, and found everyone suffering under the expectation to work long hours. “People here are probably doing 14, 15 hours of work a day,” one consultant said in the paper. “Your ability to get by on little sleep is a necessary skill set.”

Some were working 70 hours a week. “Such hours made it difficult to meet basic physical needs,” the researchers wrote.

Men and women reacted differently to the problem, through the lens of those two stereotypes mentioned earlier.

Because it was assumed that women want to spend more time with family, the researchers found that the firm's senior female partners were criticized in the interviews as bad mothers. “We heard not one positive comment about women partners as mothers, but many negative comments from both men and women,” the researchers wrote. Male partners' roles as fathers did not come up for criticism in the same way.

Fearing becoming “bad mothers” like those partners, junior female associates took less demanding roles and wound up losing out on promotion possibilities.

(By the way, those women weren't "bad mothers" -- they said they had flexibility as a partner to be home when they wanted to.)

When women left the office early at the firm, coworkers assumed they had family obligations. Or the women would explicitly tell others they were leaving to tend to a family need because, in part, they didn't want to be seen as bad mothers, Ely said. This all contributed to the view that the women were less-than-ideal workers.

When men left early, the assumption was that they were networking or going out for work-related drinks or dinner. The men also typically didn’t explain where they were going.

Meanwhile, men’s issues with overwork were kept under wraps. Many either suffered in silence or pretended to work 24/7 while tending to family needs on the sly. Those findings were first reported in a paper by Boston University’s Reid earlier this year.

In interviews, both men and women consultants said that the pull of family responsibilities took women off the partner track and forced them to quit. Yet the researchers found men and women left the firm at the same rate. This was masked in part because many partners were hired from outside the firm and tended to be male, and because many women never made it to partner and stalled out at the associate level.

In fact, men left the firm out of frustration with quality of life. Says one father in the paper: “I wouldn’t characterize myself as unhappy. It’s more overworked, and under-familied ... I’d bet that a year from now I’m working somewhere else.” He quit one year later, the paper says.

Worse, a lot of the work was a waste of time, the researchers found. The consulting firm's culture was one of over-preparedness, and many consultants said they had pulled unnecessary all-nighters working on presentations. In the end, they provided clients with way more material than would ever be wanted or even useful.

"When we asked why they did it, they’d say, 'That’s how you prove how smart you are,'" Ely said.

According to Ely, when she and her co-researchers presented their findings to the firm, they didn't want to hear it. The leaders wanted to talk about the company's problems with women, not bigger, harder-to-tackle cultural issues.

"They said, 'Maybe you didn’t talk to enough people,'" Ely said. "But we talked to a lot of people. We said, 'Look this is a pervasive finding.' It wasn’t like they were hostile, but basically the project ended at that point."

The researchers theorize that the partners' commitment to a set line of thinking about men as ideal workers and women as ideal mothers contributed to their denial.

Ely said that normally a second phase of research would’ve involved experimenting with the hours the consultants worked and measuring productivity and happiness. Similar research happened a few years ago at the Boston Consulting Group, which experimented with enforced time off for consultants and found that it resulted in happier workers -- and better performance. Ely said more work needs to be done to figure out whether dealing with the overwork problem would alleviate the burden of those gender stereotypes. That would take a long time to see, she said.

The paper also takes care to note that the issues faced by this firm are typical of higher-income, professional employees. For lower-wage workers, the problem usually isn’t too many hours, but rather the unpredictability of their schedules or the scramble to grab enough hours a week to make it to full time.

Still, these set stereotypes about men and women aren't limited to white-collar workers, Ely said. “The gender expectation around work and family has been around since the Industrial Revolution. That’s the way it’s been.”

Why Greece Is Not Leaving The Eurozone, Despite Its Latest Defiant Move

Greece's announcement Friday that it would postpone the latest 300 million euro repayment it owes the International Monetary Fund until the end of June has prompted a flood of doubts about Greece's future in the Eurozone.

But ominous warnings notwithstanding, a lot more would need to happen before Greece would leave the European monetary union. While key differences remain between Greece and its international creditors regarding the terms of the bailout needed to keep the country afloat, the negotiations are far from over. And experts say that both sides are concerned enough about the unknown consequences of a Greek departure that it remains a highly unlikely scenario.

Below is a primer on the latest drama between Greece and its creditors and some context for people lost in the sea of acronyms, foreign leaders and euro signs.

What exactly happened this week between Greece and its creditors?

Greece's announcement means that instead of making its scheduled payment of 300 million euros June 5, Greece will instead bundle the four installment payments it owes the IMF for the month of June into a single payment of 1.6 billion euros at the end of the month.

Greece's postponement is the latest in a series of chess moves between the country's left-wing government and the so-called troika of creditors comprised of the IMF, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission, the government body representing the 19 Eurozone countries. On Tuesday, the troika issued a joint proposal to make available to Greece the remaining 7.2 billion euros previously-promised in bailout loans in exchange for a series of fiscal reforms. Since 2010, the IMF, the ECB and Eurozone member nations have provided Greece with loans amounting to 240 billion euros.

But Greece had submitted its own debt restructuring plan to its European creditors Monday, and Tuesday's proposal from the troika did not accommodate many of Greece's demands. As a result, it was received coldly by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and may have prompted Greece’s announcement Friday. Tsipras, head of the left-wing Syriza party, was elected in January on a platform of renegotiating the terms of Greece's international bailout in order to provide relief to the struggling Greek economy and restore funding for social programs.

Is Greece finally about to leave the Eurozone?

In response to the news that Greece would be postponing its IMF repayments, press reports were filled with doom-and-gloom pronouncements that this was finally the beginning of a “Grexit,” or Greek exit from the Eurozone. An exit would happen if Greece decided the terms of its international bailout were not worth the costs and that defaulting on its debt and readopting the drachma, its pre-Euro currency until 2001, was its best option. Economists are divided about how well an exit would work for Greece, but most agree it would be a devastating blow to the viability of the Eurozone project.

If Greece leaves the Eurozone, it would have to create a new currency overnight, which would probably cause serious market tremors and force it to stave off a run on its financial institutions. But it would allow Greece to devalue its currency, boosting exports and enabling it to restore funding on social programs.

But two experts on the Eurozone crisis told The Huffington Post that a Grexit remains very unlikely, because the other Eurozone countries are too worried about the fallout from a Greek departure to insist on terms that would force Greece to abandon negotiations.

Nicolas Véron, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former French government advisor, described the week’s developments as political theatre intended to reassure domestic constituencies in both Greece and top Eurozone creditor countries like Germany.

“If you simplify it by saying the two main negotiators are Alexis Tsipras and [German chancellor] Angela Merkel, they need to find a deal, but each of them also needs to sell the deal to their constituents,” Véron said. “Many of us who look at the substance believe the two parties are not too far apart, but far apart in politics and how they can sell it. There are hardliners on both sides. Merkel and Tsipras are not hardliners in their respective camps.”

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, characterized Greece’s Friday announcement as a genuine negotiating tactic aimed at securing more favorable terms than those the creditors had offered thus far.

“I think it shows the troika that the Greek government is serious, that the troika cannot just dictate the terms of an agreement,” Weisbrot said. “It is a real shot across the bow and it surprised them, too.”

Weisbrot believes that even if Greece defaulted, the troika of creditors would act to head off a Greek exit from the Eurozone. He cited as an example the case of Argentina, which defaulted on its debts to the IMF in 2003. But “the IMF backed down,” Weisbrot said. It reached a compromise with Argentina that included a new loan from the IMF on terms Argentina could accept in exchange for a debt repayment.

In Greece, “the IMF does not want a default either,” Weisbrot said.

In angry speech to the Greek parliament Friday, Tsipras nonetheless declared the two sides are “closer than ever” to reaching a deal.

What are the outstanding differences between the two sides?

In the dueling proposals from Greece and its creditors, a number of differences remain. A key sticking point is how much of a primary budget surplus, or budget surplus before interest payments, Greece should be required to achieve. The troika wants Greece to achieve a 3.5 percent primary budget surplus by 2018, while Greece maintains that anything more than a 1.5 percent primary budget surplus would prevent the Greek economy from growing at a healthy pace again. The troika is calling for Greece to achieve the budget targets partly through an increase in the value-added tax and cuts to pension benefits equivalent to 2 percent of Greece’s GDP, which Greece's ruling Syriza party finds unacceptable. And Greece is asking for half of the 144 billion euro principal it owes Eurozone member nations from the first bailout round to be cancelled entirely.

The seemingly arcane dispute is part of a broader conflict between Greece and the wealthy Eurozone nations that have shouldered the lion’s share of the bailout over who and what is to blame from the current crisis. Among the creditor nations, Germany in particular has argued that Greece's economic troubles are due to its fiscal irresponsibility. Germany has insisted that the bailout include provisions requiring Greece to reduce its spending and raise taxes, as well as deregulate the labor market and adopt anticorruption measures that would render the country more economically competitive.

Greece, for its part, claims that the austerity imposed by the international creditors has prevented the Greek economy from recovering, which has caused untold suffering and in turn made it impossible to repay the money it owes. Greece's GDP has declined by more than 25 percent since 2008; recovering slower from the 2008 crisis than the United States from the Great Depression, or Germany after World War II. Currently, one out of every three Greeks lives at or below the poverty line.

What happens next?

Since the IMF's managing director, Christine Lagarde, appears to have accepted Greece’s end-of-June payment bundling plan, the next major deadline is June 30. That date marks the end of the four-month extension passed in March to allow for the newly elected Greek government to negotiate new bailout terms with the troika. If the current agreement is again extended after June 30, though, the parties will have to contend with an even more onerous July repayment schedule. On July 13, Greece must pay another 465 million euros to the IMF. And on July 19 and 20, 3.5 billion euros that Greece owes the European Central Bank comes due. It is not clear that Greece has the funds to repay these debts and continue basic government functions.

Another possibility floated by some Greek officials is for Greece to have new snap elections that might reaffirm the Syriza-led government's mandate to renegotiate the terms of the bailout.

In the meantime, Tsipras is intent on pressuring the Eurozone countries in the court of public opinion.

"The strangulation of a country is a matter of moral order which conflicts with the founding principles of Europe," Tsipras said on Friday.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the reasons Greece might hold new elections. Snap elections might reaffirm the current government's mandate to renegotiate the terms of the bailout.

U.S. Adds 280,000 Jobs In May; Unemployment Rises To 5.5 Percent

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. employers added a robust 280,000 jobs in May, showing that the economy is back on track after starting 2015 in a slump.

The Labor Department said Friday that the unemployment rate ticked up to 5.5 percent from 5.4 percent in April. But that occurred for a good reason: Hundreds of thousands more people sought jobs in May, and not all found them.

Last month's strong job growth suggests that employers remained confident enough to keep hiring even after the economy shrank during the first three months of the year. The government also revised up its estimate of job growth in March and April by a combined net 32,000.

Construction and health care companies the drove the May job growth. On the negative side, persistently cheaper oil led energy companies to shed workers for a fifth straight month.

Still, average hourly wages rose only 2.3 percent from a year earlier. Tepid pay gains has been a persistent problem for the economy.

Over the past three months, the economy has added an average of 207,000 jobs, a decent gain though lower than last year's average of 263,667.

Consumers, the main driver of the U.S. economy, remain fairly cautious. Factory orders have dropped. But Friday's solid jobs report could help confirm the economy's vitality.

Auto and home sales are accelerating despite otherwise slow-spending consumers. More big employers, such as Wal-Mart, have unveiled pay hikes.

Those factors could power faster growth, fuel job gains and boost wages. If they do, a broader economic recovery than the one that's existed in the six years since the Great Recession officially ended could emerge.

Over the past 12 months, around 3 million jobs have been added. Those additional paychecks helped increase spending on housing and autos. Sales of newly built homes have surged 23.7 percent through the first four months of 2015 compared with a year ago, government data show. Rising demand for new homes could lead construction firms to ramp up hiring.

Americans bought 1.64 million cars and trucks in May, the most since July 2005. If that trend were to endure, it would benefit a manufacturing sector that's added a scant 4,000 jobs since January.

Employers seem to be envisioning a healthier economy, given that the weekly number of people applying for unemployment benefits — a proxy for layoffs — has remained under a historically low 300,000 for more than four months. By holding on to nearly all their workers, businesses are ensuring that they will have the capacity to respond to greater customer demand.

But the economy faces other challenges. The dollar has appreciated about 19 percent in the past year against other major currencies. That trend has made U.S. goods costlier overseas, thereby squeezing exports and the U.S.-based branches of foreign companies.

Nor has cheaper gasoline delivered much help. Instead of sparking the wave of consumer spending that many economists had expected, a nearly 45 percent drop in oil prices since July has damaged a U.S. economy increasingly reliant on energy drilling. The energy industry has shed workers and cut orders for pipelines and equipment.

The setbacks have been substantial enough that the International Monetary Fund on Thursday said it thinks the Federal Reserve should hold off on raising short-term interest rates until 2016. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, saying a rate increase could disrupt the economy, urged the Fed to await signs of wage growth.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen has said she expects to raise rates this year if the economy continues to improve, thereby ending nearly seven years of record-low rates.

Falling unemployment usually leads to fewer people seeking work, forcing employers to boost wages. But plenty of people are still searching for jobs. The aftermath of the recession has left 8.5 million people unemployed and seeking work, about 1.3 million more than were jobless before the downturn began in late 2007.

Companies often increase pay when their workers become more productive. Yet productivity fell at a 3.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter — a sharper drop than the decline estimated a month ago, the government said Thursday.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Is Now A Billionaire

NEW YORK -- Jamie Dimon is finally a billionaire.

The JPMorgan Chase CEO and chairman’s net worth is now estimated at $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His fortune has soared as shares in the country’s largest bank by assets, in which he has a $485 million stake, near a record high.

JPMorgan stock has climbed over the past year.

Bank executives do not usually become billionaires. Though Dimon took home a pay package worth $20 million last year, financiers in the three-comma club usually accumulate wealth through money management and hedge funds, according to Bloomberg. But Dimon, long a silver-coiffed media darling, has proven himself to be a survivor, even in one of the industry’s most volatile eras in recent history.

After helping to assemble Citigroup, he was forced out in 1998 by his boss and mentor, Sandy Weill. Dimon revived Chicago-based Bank One and sold it to JPMorgan in 2004. He became the chief executive of the combined bank in 2005 and, the next year, added the chairman title.

He captained the bank through the choppy seas of the financial crisis in 2007. But, facing billions in an array of fines and settlements, he began to lose shareholders’ confidence in 2013.

Still, after a contentious vote, he managed to retain his status as an “imperial CEO,” overseeing the board as chairman and thereby acting as his own boss. That year, the Financial Times dubbed him “the last king of Wall Street.”

He is even, quite literally, a survivor. After a year-long battle with throat cancer, Dimon announced he was cancer-free last December.

Last week, he told a group of investors that listening to shareholder advisory groups critical of his management was “lazy.”

“If you do that, you are just irresponsible, I’m sorry,” he said. “And you probably aren’t a very good investor either.

JPMorgan spokesman Andrew Gray declined to comment.

At least in the fictional milieu of HBO's "Silicon Valley," Dimon is in some interesting company:

Wages For College Grads Are Now Lower Than They Were 15 Years Ago

College graduates, brace yourselves for some disappointing news.

Wages for university grads are 2.5 percent lower than what they were 15 years ago, according to the latest edition of the Economic Policy Institute's annual report on the labor market prospects of new workers. The research found that young college grads’ hourly wages currently sit at an average of $17.94, or just over $37,000 annually. In 2000, the average hourly rate was $18.41.

This drop has hit female grads hardest: Their wages fell from $17.74 in 2000 to $16.56 in 2015 -- a 6.7 percent decrease. Wages for their male counterparts actually increased by 1 percent over the same time period -- from $19.44 to $19.64.

Female grads, per the study, earn 15.7 percent less than their male counterparts, or roughly 84.3 cents to a man's dollar. Meanwhile, the wage gap between men and women in the national workforce overall sees women earning only 78 cents to a man's dollar. While the gap is narrower for female college grads, according to the EPI's study, these data show that having a higher education degree does not necessarily mean equal pay for young women.

“It’s possible that since we’re looking at averages, we’re not picking up on growth in high-end jobs,” senior economist Elise Gould, one of the study’s authors, said of the diverging wages among men and women.

Men are not faring much better, though. Their 1 percent wage increase is minuscule, considering the fact that it represents a period of 15 years.

The national unemployment rate is currently at 5.4 percent, which signals a promising wage advantage for those just entering the workforce, The Wall Street Journal noted recently. But the EPI study, which focuses on younger workers, found that unemployment remains high for college graduates, 7.2 percent of whom are without jobs.

The unemployment rate for grads was 5.5 percent in 2007, before the recession. The EPI researchers point to dwindling demand for goods and services, which negatively impacts companies’ ability to bring in new hires.

Despite their degrees and skills, many grads find themselves downgrading to less-desired employers when jobs are scarce, the researchers found.

This can be detrimental to young professionals' careers, since low starting salaries will likely set them back for subsequent jobs. Research has shown that those who graduate in a poor economy can expect wage losses for as long as 10 years as a result of low initial wages.

For young people, this loss “probably puts off other investments because they don’t have the income to pay for it, like buying a car or a house,” Gould said.

The report also found that college grads aren’t heading to graduate school as a way to ride out the poor job market. Enrollment rates for additional schooling, like master’s programs, are relatively equal to enrollment rates before the recession. While the percentage of women in grad school has picked up following a continuous decrease since 2010, enrollment rates for men dropped 6 percentage points between 2011 and 2014.

Many college students take on campus jobs to pay their tuition, noted Will Kimball, another author on the study. “If there aren’t enough opportunities for them to earn money or put themselves through college, that certainly will impact their ability to enroll in further programs.”

In order for college graduates to see better prospects, policies that bump up employment and salaries must be enacted, and all workers -- not just new graduates -- will need to have greater bargaining power.

“The biggest thing is to approach an economy that has full employment, where people can negotiate better wages and get better jobs when employers need more workers,” Kimball said.

Supreme Court Rules Against Abercrombie & Fitch In Discrimination Case

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 on Monday that retailer Abercrombie & Fitch may have violated workplace discrimination law when it turned down a Muslim job applicant because she wore a hijab, even though her religious beliefs never came up in the interview.

Samantha Elauf, the job seeker at the center of the case, applied for a sales position at an Abercrombie children's store in Oklahoma in 2008. Despite her high marks in the interview, Elauf didn't land the job because her headscarf ran afoul of Abercrombie's employee "look policy," which bars hats and promotes the retailer's preppy brand. Elauf sued with the help of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Civil rights law requires that employers accommodate workers' religious beliefs in the workplace, and forbids them from firing or not hiring someone because of those beliefs. But Abercrombie argued that it couldn't have known to make such an accommodation because Elauf, who was 17 at the time, never requested one.

The majority of justices didn't buy that argument, reversing an earlier appeals ruling in Abercrombie's favor. They said that whether or not Abercrombie had firm knowledge of Elauf's need for an accommodation was not relevant -- only whether her headscarf was a "motivating factor" in their decision not to hire her. (In Elauf's case, an Abercrombie manager had correctly assumed that Elauf was Muslim, and that she would regularly wear the hijab on the job.)

"Motive and knowledge are separate concepts," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. "[A]n employer who acts with the motive of avoiding accommodation may violate [the law] even if he has no more than an unsubstantiated suspicion that accommodation would be needed."

The ruling sends Elauf's case back to the lower court for further consideration. Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissent, penning an opinion that partially concurred with the majority.

In a statement, Abercrombie noted that the Supreme Court ruling did not find that the company discriminated against Elauf, only that Elauf can pursue her claim in court. The company said it is considering its "next steps" in the case.

"We have made significant enhancements to our store associate policies, including the replacement of the 'look policy' with a new dress code that allows associates to be more individualistic; changed our hiring practices to not consider attractiveness; and changed store associates' titles from 'Model' to 'Brand Representative' to align with their new customer focus," the company said.

Abercrombie's lawyers argued that a ruling in favor of Elauf would pressure companies to ask or make assumptions about job seekers' religious beliefs -- a dicey proposition, they said, since employers aren't supposed to inquire about a worker's religion. But the EEOC said that a job applicant like Elauf shouldn't have to bear the full burden of raising the possibility of a religious accommodation, especially since the employer would know best whether there may be a conflict with company policy.

Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court's conservative wing, signaled his leaning on the case during oral arguments in February, when he raised a hypothetical situation that, by his own admission, sounded "like a joke."

"So the first is a Sikh man wearing a turban. The second is a Hasidic man wearing a hat. The third is a Muslim woman wearing a niqab. The fourth is a Catholic nun in a habit," Alito said. "Now, do you think ... that those people have to say, 'We just want to tell you, we're dressed this way for a religious reason. We're not just trying to make a fashion statement'?"

Alito said there were ways for an employer to address the issue without directly asking a job applicant about his or her religion. In the hypothetical case of someone who appears to be Middle Eastern and who wears a long beard, he asked, "Why can't the employers just simply say, 'We have a "look policy" that doesn't permit beards. Can you comply with that policy?'"

Abercrombie has been sued at least two other times over headscarves -- once by an applicant who, like Elauf, said she was denied a job because of hers, and once by an employee who lost her job after being ordered to remove hers. Abercrombie settled both of those cases and then changed its policy to allow for headscarves, though it continued to defend its actions in the Elauf case.

In briefs filed with the court, Abercrombie had the backing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while Elauf drew support from civil, religious and gay rights groups.

This story has been updated with comment from Abercrombie.