Same religion, different treatment. The role of origin country characteristics in employers’ decisions to hire Muslims

ABSTRACT

Using data from a cross-nationally harmonised correspondence test, we examined how employers in five European labour markets (Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain) respond to applications received from Muslim job seekers with ancestry from 22 different countries of origin. Drawing on the interdisciplinary literature on anti-Muslim prejudice, we expected that callbacks would depend on characteristics of applicants’ origin countries that could signal cultural value incompatibility and political and military oppression, thus triggering perceptions of symbolic and security threats, respectively. The results point to lower callback rates for Muslims, the higher the level of authoritarianism and gender inequality in their origin country. Results for authoritarianism are especially robust across different operationalizations of threat and model specifications. We also find that the association between authoritarianism and callbacks was only statistically significant for men, indicating that Muslim men are especially at risk of exclusion from employment opportunities.

KEYWORDS:

• Employer discrimination
• anti-Muslim prejudice
• symbolic threat
• security threat
• correspondence test

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by: the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences of Utrecht University (FETC15-102), the Ethics Panel of Nuffield College, University of Oxford (ETH-160224306), the WZB Research Ethics Committee (WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, AdHoc Committee), the Norwegian National Research Ethics Committee for the Social Sciences and Humanities (DENS, 2015/451) and the Committee of Ethics in Research of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M; CEI-2015-12). Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Notes

1 The literature distinguishes between, on the one hand, an unjustifiable negative attitude toward Muslims as a group – a form of prejudice often resulting from feelings of hostility and fear – and, on the other hand, a more principled opposition toward Islam as a religion or culture (Verkuyten 2021). According to the latter perspective, individuals who oppose Islam as a religion need not be prejudiced: they may endorse secular and democratic convictions and reject fundamentalist forms of religiosity or practices perceived as incompatible with liberal democratic values (Helbling 2014; Helbling and Traunmüller 2020; Imhoff and Recker 2012). We do not build on this literature as we believe it is more suitable to understand opposition to specific religious practices more generally than discrimination against Muslims at the workplace.

2 Out of a total of 19,181 applications: the remaining 291 applications were either ambiguously recorded by the software or were never taken into consideration by employers (the latter could be because of missing documents that were required for applying but not included in the experimental protocol, because the hiring procedure had already closed at the moment the application was received, or because the advertised position was no longer available).

3 Moroccans were oversampled in the Netherlands and Spain; Turks in Germany and the Netherlands; Lebanese in Germany; Somali in Norway; Nigerians in Britain; Pakistani in Britain and Norway. More information on the research design are provided in Lancee et al. (2019; 2021). In the analyses, we always controlled for the country where the fieldwork took place.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme: [Grant Number No 649255 (GEMM Project)].