Muslims in the UK have well-documented challenges in the labor market, with conservative commentators often attributing this to so-called “sociocultural attitudes” that undermine them. Research from the University of Bristol suggests that this hypothesis isn’t born out of reality.
The research challenges the often pervasive narrative that any struggles experienced by Muslims in the labor market are due to their religious and cultural behaviors, and provides empirical evidence that such issues cannot explain comparatively high unemployment and inactivity rates among Muslims in the UK.
Discrimination is key
As a result, the findings underline that the more likely culprit is the anti-Mulsim discrimination faced by Muslims which is the main barrier to accessing work.
“It is well established that Muslims experience the greatest faith penalty in the labor market relative to any other religious groups even after adjusting for factors that are likely to impact employment, such as education, age, region, language proficiency, and health,” the researcher explains.
“While some academics argue that discrimination is likely to be an important driver of these penalties, others suggest that factors related to cultural values are the cause, particularly among women. In the context of Muslims, these ‘internal cultural factors,’ namely ‘tastes for isolation,’ and particularly for women, a supposed commitment to ‘traditional gender norms,’ are assumed to stem from their religion.”
Looking past assumptions
The researchers analyzed 10 years’ worth of data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which gathers socioeconomic and cultural information from approximately 40,000 households. The aim was to understand whether the “Muslim penalty” disappears once so-called sociocultural attitudes are accounted for, as conservative commentators often suggest. These include things like high religiosity, more traditional views, low levels of civic participation, and so on.
The analysis found no such link, and also found that discrimination may not solely be a case of one’s color and religion, but also one’s country of origin. The data shows that there is a particular risk of unemployment for Black African and Black Caribbean men, regardless of what faith they identified with or practiced.
This strongly suggests that there is a clear hierarchy in the British labor market according to one’s skin color, which is something that the researcher hopes to further explore in future research.
