> This site and hundreds like it are totally legal in the US.
Maybe only because they haven't been sued yet? E-Harmony got sued in a class action lawsuit because they didn't support same-sex matching[1]. They ended up settling out of court and establishing a site that does same-sex matching, because it wasn't clear to them that they would win the lawsuit.
This is a more substantive question but there's a lot of evidence it's not a problem. According to your article, eHarmony was sued in 2008, created the "separate but equal" site, and then merged them in 2012 after more complaints.
However, 3 years later, they still have separate portals for people interested in dating specific people:
Those portals are nominally for finding someone else of that race/religion - they don't prevent you from signing up if you're not a member of the group (I checked). That is the part that seems like it might not fly under California law - Jopwell is a business; so I don't see how they can legally deny accommodations based on race. I don't think the issue is with a company using Jopwell to find candidates, but rather with Jopwell telling white people that they are denied service due to race.
If you think that is OK, I don't see how you could be against a recruiting company that always rejected nonwhite candidates for placement (but didn't have that as part of their explicit mission).
I think this is a fair question, and I'm sure they'll address it in whatever way is necessary. As a startup, it's best to have a focus, otherwise you're just another generic recruiter.
It's possible that they'll need to tweak how they express that focus in terms of site design and onboarding process. I mean, if a site as big as eHarmony had to change their approach, it's quite likely a startup will run into similar issues. (I haven't tried signing up with Jopwell to see how they implemented the workflow, so I have no idea what it says currently.)
Maybe only because they haven't been sued yet? E-Harmony got sued in a class action lawsuit because they didn't support same-sex matching[1]. They ended up settling out of court and establishing a site that does same-sex matching, because it wasn't clear to them that they would win the lawsuit.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/EHarmony-sued-for-excl...
See also http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection....
To be fair all this stuff seems like concern trolling to me, but it's also not clear to my non-lawyer self that it is totally legit.