Discrimination: Experimental Evidence from the German, Swedish and Austrian Labor Markets

Compared to their male counterparts, refugee women exhibit low employment rates in many countries. Discrimination by recruiters could possibly explain this phenomenon, but thus far, there is little direct evidence on this. This study addresses this gap. We develop a set of hypotheses about the effects of gender and family status on refugees’ labor market integration, and then test these hypotheses using data from an original survey experiment administered in 2019 to online panels of recruiters in three major refugee-receiving countries (Germany, Austria, and Sweden). We find that recruiters indeed prefer female over male refugees across different job types, all else equal. However, we also find evidence of a disadvantage connected with motherhood among refugees. Overall, our findings raise doubts about the relevance of discrimination as an explanation for the observed employment gap between male and female refugees.

Gainful employment is a central dimension of immigrant integration into host countries (Harder et al. 2018). Of course, simply having a job is not equivalent to successful integration (e.g., Ballarino and Panichella 2015), but not having a job will very likely impede other forms of social integration (e.g., Gallie 1999). Unfortunately, immigrants in many Western societies struggle to find employment, which is particularly the case for refugees and other humanitarian immigrants (Hooijer and Picot 2015; De Vroome and van Tubergen 2010). In addition, within this already disadvantaged group, female refugees’ employment rates are significantly lower compared to those of their male peers (Bloch 2007; Cheung and Phillimore 2017). In this paper, we focus on this gender employment gap among refugees.

Different explanations exist for why female refugees are less likely to have employment than their male peers are. One potential explanation is that female refugees are discriminated against by virtue of being refugees and immigrants (Zschirnt and Ruedin 2016), and because they are women (González, Cortina and Rodríguez 2019). This added disadvantage in recruitment that refugee women experience might explain at least a part of the gap between refugee men and women that is empirically observed in western economies. However, the case for the “double burden” hypothesis is by far not open-and-shut because refugee women might have an advantage in recruitment over their male peers. This is because any negative attributes applied to refugees (e.g., unreliable, untrustworthy; e.g., Kotzur et al. 2019) are applied primarily to refugee men (Eagly and Kite 1987) but less so to women. In addition, stereotypes commonly attached to women (e.g., warmth, communality; see Ellemers 2018) could counteract negative stereotypes often applied to refugees. If that were the case, and if refugee women accordingly hold an advantage over male refugees in recruitment, this would imply that the employment gap among refugees would result from factors other than discrimination in recruitment. Such other factors could include traditional beliefs about proper gender roles held in immigrant and refugee communities, which lead women in these communities to adopt the homemaker role instead of seeking to join the labor force (Fernández and Fogli 2009; Koopmans 2016; but see also Breidahl and Larsen 2016), or institutional factors, such as a lack of affordable childcare and other supportive family policies in their destination countries (Dumper 2002).

Empirically, the question of whether discrimination or other factors are more important determinants of the refugee gender employment gap is not yet settled. Existing research has largely relied on indirect evidence such as testimonies from refugees (e.g., Bloch 2007; Dumper 2002) or survey or registry data where employment gaps that cannot be attributed to differences in productivity serve as a indicatorsof discrimination (Bevelander 2011). An arguably superior approach is to study directly recruiters’ perceptions and hiring behaviors, but this has only rarely been done (but see Lundborg and Skedinger 2016; Vernby and Dancygier 2019).

References https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01979183221134274#bibr43-01979183221134274