The pesky interviewer

I've been looking for work lately and went to an interview recently where I wasn't asked a single question on my area of expertise during the technical round which lasted less than five minutes.

It seemed they only wanted to know about my personal life which annoyed me a bit. A talk with some friends revealed that not everybody finds personal questions inappropriate, some think that they are quite pertinent. Employers seriously consider your "family status" before they give you a job, more so if you're a young woman.

After I'd given my brief introduction, this interviewer asked me about my "family status". It caught me off guard and my thoughts instantly turned to my parents and I had just opened my mouth to talk about them, when all the buzzing in my nervous brain suddenly turned to pin drop silence as I realized that this was a question about my marital status. This was followed by "what about your plans in the next two years" and I immediately thought he wanted to know if I was going to change my "family status" soon.

I'm not sure that the marital status of a prospective employee says anything about his/her capabilities even though people insist that here in India, it gives an idea about whether the person would be willing to sacrifice all their days and nights to their job. Another part is that, if you're a single woman, the assumption is that you are going to marry soon and quit your job to parcel yourself off to wherever your spouse would want to take you. Sigh. Stereotypes. I think no one, neither man nor woman should have to reveal their 'status'.

What do HR managers think of this? Do such questions really add any value to their assessments of candidates? Personally, I feel that not only is it quite rude but also useless and unreliable information which nobody really has any way of checking out. So, people are just trying to satisfy some kind of voyeuristic urge in themselves which they have rationalized in their minds as professional curiosity?

P.S. This is off topic but I must confess to being rather derisory about Facebook's relationship statuses. I try not to paint everyone with the same brush but there are too many people who take them far too seriously and these days there seems to be real peer pressure to have 'something' on your relationship status. I've actually been told that if one were to update their facebook to 'Single', it means they are 'soliciting' for romantic attention. Ugh. It's complicated. Shakespeare would have done better to say, the world is a market place..