Despite growing awareness of the scale and implications of racial discrimination in the labor market, research from the University of Amsterdam highlights how big a problem it continues to be.
Previous research examining the assimilation of international immigrants and their offspring into the job market in Europe has identified a Muslim background as the principal catalyst for prejudice and discrimination.
However, these studies have not accounted for the potential impediment to employment that physical appearance may pose. To bridge this gap, the new study scrutinized the extent to which being part of a “visible” minority (that is, having a non-white phenotype) constitutes an additional source of discrimination against the descendants of international immigrants in Europe.
Barriers to employment
The study reveals that having a black or Asian/Indigenous American phenotype diminishes the likelihood of employer interest by approximately 20% (on average across the three countries studied: Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands), while possessing a dark-skinned Caucasian phenotype (prevalent in North Africa) lowers the average probability by approximately 10%, relative to having a white phenotype.
These estimates capture the impact of applicants’ phenotype on European employers’ responses once decoupled from the effect of the applicants’ ancestral region. However, the study also demonstrates that the combined effect of ethnic background and phenotype can lead to significant levels of discrimination in Europe.
To execute the study, the researchers analyzed the responses of nearly 13,000 European companies to fictitious job applications in the three aforementioned European countries where attaching a photograph to CVs is a customary practice.
The researchers modified the names and images that appeared on the fictitious job applications (while maintaining all other CV attributes) submitted for actual job openings across a broad array of occupations.
All of the mock applicants were young nationals of European countries (with the nationality of the test country) born to parents from four major world regions (Europe-U.S., Maghreb-Middle East, Latin America-Caribbean, and Asia). The ethnic ancestry was primarily indicated in the CVs through the full names of the candidates.
The photographs employed in the CVs were carefully selected to be physically attractive but varied markedly in racial appearance across four phenotypic groups (labeled “Black,” “Asian/Indigenous American,” “Dark-skinned Caucasian,” and “White Caucasian”). This experimental design enabled the researchers to produce the first racial discrimination estimates comparable across countries in the field-experimental literature.
Racial discrimination
“Most of what we knew about racial discrimination in job recruitment to date came from Anglo countries, especially the US, where the use of photographs in job applications is prohibited by law. This forced researchers to estimate racial discrimination using only the applicants’ names, which is very problematic. A crucial advantage of our study is that we investigated the role of phenotype and ethnic background as potentially different triggers of discrimination by exploiting plausible phenotypic variation in large regions of ancestry,” the researchers explain.
“According to our estimates, in the three countries studied, applicants of Maghreb and Middle Eastern descent with black phenotypes have to submit approximately fifty percent more applications to receive a call from employers than applicants with identical CVs but with European names and white phenotypes. These estimates of discrimination are comparable in size, if not superior, to those usually found in the case of African Americans in the United States. Discrimination against applicants with black phenotypes and European or American parents is somewhat lower but also significant,” they continue.
National differences
The examination of racial discrimination patterns within the three nations involved in the experiment also revealed notable disparities between Spain and the two northern countries.
“Our results suggest that phenotype acts as an autonomous trigger of discrimination in Germany and the Netherlands, reducing employment opportunities for non-white applicants regardless of their parental origin. However, in Spain discrimination seems to be restricted to certain combinations of phenotype and ancestry, particularly those in which applicants’ physical appearance is most prototypical of their region of ancestry,” the researchers explain.
“This doesn’t mean that phenotype is irrelevant in Spain, it isn’t at all; it only means that its effect on employers’ responses seems more difficult to disentangle from the effect of applicants’ ethnic ancestry,” they conclude.
