Is there a penalty to being a Catholic in Northern Ireland: an econometric analysis of the relationship between religious belief and occupational success

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the issue of occupational discrimination. It identifies four occupational classes—joblessness; unskilled/semi-skilled employment; skilled manual/non-manual employment; and professional/managerial employment. It then asks, using the framework of a multinomial logit model, how much of the difference in the relative probabilities of Catholics and Protestants, in Northern Ireland, being in these occupational classes is the result of differences in inter-community worker attributes and how much is the result of prejudice. The answer to this question is based on a concept of a `religion penalty' which is developed and defined in this paper. The empirical base from which these answers spring is the Sample of Anonymised Records (SAR) drawn from the 1991 Census for Northern Ireland. We conclude that a great deal of the over-representation of Catholic men among the jobless, and their under-representation as employees in professional/managerial occupations, had to do with the fact they faced a religion penalty—even after controlling for what they were, they were penalised for who they were. The situation for Catholic women was considerably better than for Catholic men. Again, the over-representation of Catholic women among the jobless, and their under-representation in skilled manual/non-manual jobs, had much to do with the fact that they faced a religion penalty though the size of this penalty was much lower than that faced by Catholic men.