“Just take it off, where’s the problem?” How online commenters draw on neoliberal rationality to justify labour market discrimination against women wearing headscarves

ABSTRACT

In this article we demonstrate how online commenters apply neoliberal rationality to defend the labour market exclusion of Muslim women wearing headscarves. Applying a thematic analysis, we identify the arguments of a debate in an online forum that discussed job market difficulties of Muslim women wearing headscarves. These arguments did not acknowledge the existence of discrimination but blamed the women for not adapting to the labour market. They supported an unregulated freedom for employers in their hiring-choices and argued that the employment of women wearing headscarves was harmful to firms’ profits, e.g. because these women would scare away customers, or because they were deemed less productive. Thus, online commenters prioritized employer’s interests over democratic values such as religious freedom. We use the concept of neoliberal rationality by Wendy Brown to explain our findings and to show how neoliberal values are used to rationalize the mistreatment of a marginalized group.

KEYWORDS:

• Muslim women
• headscarf
• discrimination
• neoliberal rationality
• labour market
• Islamophobia

Acknowledgements

We thank Theresa Fitz for her support in the coding process and Michael Leiblfinger as well as Klara Hinterhölzl for their research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We understand Islamophobia broadly as negative attitudes and all forms of discrimination against Muslims because of their religious faith. We acknowledge that some scholars prefer the term “anti-Muslim racism” (Opratko and Müller-Uri 2016).

2 Initially, this study has been published in 2016 as an IZA discussion paper (Weichselbaumer 2016).

3 About 8% of the Austrian population is of Muslim faith (ÖIF 2017). There are no official data available on how many Muslim women wear a headscarf.

4 Similarly, Hughey and Daniels (2013) analyzed how racist commenters on US online news sites escape deletion by content moderation when they use coded racial language or draw on socially and historically entrenched racial stereotypes that appeal to “common sense”. Faulkner and Bliuc (2016) identified online commenters in Australia applying a moral disengagement strategy (e.g. positively reframing harmful language through euphemisms or painting victims as deserving of denigration) to make racist statements appear moral and justified.

5 See for example https://orf.at/v2/stories/2357726/2357728/ (last accessed August 1, 2021).

6 Readers of derstandard.at tend to be young (46% are 20–39 years old) and employed (68%). 26% hold a high school diploma (Matura) and 18% a university degree (ÖAW 2016). There is no information available on the characteristics of readers who also post comments.

7 We refer to a specific comment as C followed by its number. The comments were translated from German by the authors.

8 Numbers in brackets indicate how often a particular narrative was used in the comments. Because of our qualitative approach, those numbers should be interpreted solely as an indicator but not in a conventionally quantitative sense.

9 Note that commentators hardly acknowledged different forms of veiling, nor different reasons for veiling.

10 Notably, commenters usually imagined employers to be male.

11 In 2011, Niko Alm, an Austrian “Pastafarian”, won the legal right to wear a colander in his driving license photo as a religious headwear (Gander 2011).

12 In 2016, when the analyzed comments were posted, Austria did not have a legal headscarf ban. Since 2017, the Anti-Gesichtsverhüllungsgesetz bans most forms of veiling of facial features in public spaces.