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An Examination of Factors Affecting Perception of Workplace Discrimination

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Abstract

This study investigates perceptions of workplace discrimination among racial minorities in Canada. Specifically, the study examines how objective experiences of disadvantage and expectations for equity influence racial minorities’ perceptions of discrimination. The results indicate that while both of these factors affect perceptions of discrimination, expectations for equity may be especially important. Although new immigrants are among the most disadvantaged groups in the Canadian labor market, they are less likely to perceive discrimination than longer term immigrants, who may have higher expectations for equitable treatment. Education also increases the perception of discrimination among immigrants, perhaps due to the higher expectations of educated immigrants. Lastly, objective income inequity is not found to be related to perceived discrimination.

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Notes

  1. South Asians include those of East Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan or Nepali descent.

  2. The immigrant acculturation literature notes that integration is multi-dimensional and immigrants often report pluralist identities (see Berry 1997).

  3. This study also examined discrimination against persons with disabilities and came to similar conclusions as for women.

  4. The ‘recent’ and ‘earlier’ immigrant categories were created based on categories internally derived by EDS methodologists. In the immigrant integration literature, ‘recent immigrants’ are often designated as those who have been in the host country for 10 years or less (see Fleury 2007).

  5. A second measure representing ethnic group identification was also examined; respondents were asked how important their ethnic customs and traditions were on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing not important at all and 5 representing very important. Using this measure resulted in very similar findings.

  6. The analyses were also conducted with occupation divided by functional area (business and finance, health care, science and engineering, etc.). There was no significant effect of occupation on perceived discrimination under this specification.

  7. Dummy variables are used rather than a continuous measure of years in Canada in order to capture nonlinearity in the effect of this variable.

  8. In the OLS income regression, both white and visible minority employees are included in the sample, but are estimated separately. Since only those individuals who reported income are included in this section of the analysis, the sample size of visible minorities is reduced to 3,730.

  9. \(\hat D_i \) is retransformed using the following formula: exp(\(\hat D_i \)+0.5s 2), where s 2 is the variance of \(\hat D_i \) (see Baskerville (1972); Duan (1983) for a discussion of the issues involved in retransforming regression estimates).

  10. The OR are calculated as exp(b), where b is the logistic regression coefficient.

  11. OLS income regression results by visible minority status are available from the author upon request. These results indicate that being female is associated with a decrease in income and age is associated with an increase in income, but at a declining rate. As expected, education is associated with an increase in income, but this effect is greater for whites than visible minorities. Recent immigrant status is associated with a decrease in income. As expected, hours and weeks worked are associated with statistically significant increases in income for all respondents. While living in a rural area has a negative effect on the income of whites, it has a positive effect on the income of visible minorities. Speaking a non-official first language has a stronger negative effect on the income of visible minorities than on the income of whites.

  12. The standard deviation of \(\hat D_i \), corrected using bootstrapping (see Zhou 2002), is $6,214.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was part of a Ph.D. dissertation entitled: “Employment Disadvantage of Immigrants and Visible Minorities: Evidence from Three Canadian Surveys.” Preparation was supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I gratefully acknowledge the helpful feedback of Anil Verma, Jeffrey Reitz, Morley Gunderson and two anonymous reviewers in writing this paper.

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Correspondence to Rupa Banerjee.

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Banerjee, R. An Examination of Factors Affecting Perception of Workplace Discrimination. J Labor Res 29, 380–401 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-008-9047-0

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