Headscarf and job recruitment\u2014lifting the veil of labour market discrimination

Attakrit Leckcivilize,Alexander Straub

doi:10.1186/s40172-018-0071-x

Attakrit Leckcivilize, Alexander Straub

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40172-018-0071-x

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Abstract

This paper investigates effects of appearance and religious practice of job applicants on the hiring decision. We asked participants in our laboratory experiment to select fictitious candidates for an interview from a pool of CVs with comparable characteristics but different photos. Some photos were of the same Turkish women with and without a headscarf. We demonstrate the effects of appearance, ethnicity, and veiling simultaneously and propose underlying mechanisms. We find robust effects of appearance but heterogeneous effects of headscarf on callback rates based on types of occupations and recruiters’ characteristics. However, positive characteristics mitigate discrimination against headscarf and even reverse it.

Highlights

The topic of discrimination based on, for example, ethnic origin and gender in the labour market came under scrutiny of the economics discipline after the influential doctoral dissertation entitled The Economics of Discrimination by the Nobel laureate Gary Becker in 1957
Similar to Weichselbaumer (2016), Baert et al (2017), and Valfort (2017), we find that positive characteristics mitigate negative impacts of religious practice and ethnicity in job recruitment
Our laboratory experiment contributes to the sizeable literature on correspondence testing in many aspects

Summary

Introduction

The topic of discrimination based on, for example, ethnic origin and gender in the labour market came under scrutiny of the economics discipline after the influential doctoral dissertation entitled The Economics of Discrimination by the Nobel laureate Gary Becker in 1957. Many studies (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Carlsson and Rooth 2007) focused on racial discrimination at the very first stage of entry into the labour market and adopted the technique called “correspondence testing”, which is to create fake CVs, allocate fake ethnicity at random to each CV, send these CVs to job adverts. They found that ethnic minorities received significantly fewer callbacks for job interviews. In some studies (Kaas and Manger 2012), such a difference disappears when

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