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Alike but Different: How Cultural Distinctiveness Shapes Immigrant-Origin Minorities’ Access to the Labour Market

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Abstract

Does cultural dissimilarity explain discrimination against immigrant-origin minorities in the labour market? I conducted a factorial field experiment (N = 1350) to explore how explicit group cues trigger differential treatment and whether individuating information that counters cultural-based stereotypical representations mitigate discrimination. Employers were randomly assigned a job application with a putative female ethnic majority or immigrant-origin minority alias and CV photographs portraying the minority candidate with or without a headscarf—perhaps the quintessential marker of Muslim identity. Moreover, half the job applications conveyed information intended to reduce cultural distance by indicating a liberal lifestyle and civic participation. The results demonstrate that immigrant-origin women are significantly less likely to receive an invitation to a job interview, especially if they also wear a headscarf. Contrary to expectations, the differential treatment is not moderated by the individuating information in the applications. This indicates that the differential treatment is persistent and also targets immigrant-origin minorities who have acquired soft skills and signals cultural proximity.

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Notes

  1. The study was pre-registered at EGAP.org (ID: 20170412AA).

  2. A few studies manipulate explicit affiliation to religious organisations in ŕesuḿes (Pierńe, 2013; Wright et al., 2013). While this is a feasible strategy in some contexts, this type of information is not an integral part of job applications in most labour markets and therefore threatens authenticity and real-world relevance. Other studies use names as signals for different religious affiliations among the same ethnic group (Adida et al., 2010), but this is not an option in countries where religion and ethnic affiliation is often intertwined.

  3. Initial interviews with women wearing headscarves revealed that women often include pictures in their applications so as not to surprise employers at job interviews. It was also argued that social media and LinkedIn profiles would ‘reveal’ the fact that they wore headscarves anyway.

  4. Although there are exceptions, e.g., Andriessen et al. (2012) and McGinnity and Lunn (2011)

  5. For example, ethnic hierarchies are found in research on how likely local election officials are to respond to voters’ inquires on where to vote (Hughes et al., 2017) or in decisions of naturalisation (Hainmueller & Hangartner, 2013).

  6. Another example is Sniderman et al. (2004), who provide experimental evidence indicating that opposition to immigration is rooted in cultural concerns and conclude that ‘fitting in culturally promotes significantly more support for it [immigration] than fitting in economically’.

  7. Warmth is signalled by describing himself as a ‘warm and social person who gets along great with others both at work and elsewhere’.

  8. Self-expression values include social toleration, public expression, and an aspiration to liberty. Secular-rational values place less emphasis on traditional family values and religion.

  9. One way to identify the effect of religious affiliation is to manipulate explicit affiliation to religious organisations in CVs (Pierńe, 2013; Wright et al., 2013). Since this type of information is not an integral part of job applications in most labour, it threatens authenticity and real-world relevance. Other studies have used names as signals for different religious affiliations among the same ethnic group (Adida et al., 2010), but this is not an option in the Danish context where religion and ethnic affiliation is intertwined.

  10. Cooperative social housing organisations are self-governing associations, with a management council controlled entirely by residents through a policy of tenant democracy. Cooperative housing is very common in the Danish housing market, which has 540,000 cooperative housing units.

  11. Ethical considerations are outlined in Appendix C.

  12. An advantage of block-randomised design is that it effectively reduces random differences between the treatment and control groups, and if covariates are prognostic of the outcome, it enables higher-powered comparisons by reducing baseline differences (Horiuchi et al., 2007).

  13. Matched-pairs designs typically have greater statistical power. However, the difference in sample size requirements between matched and unmatched designs becomes smaller as the overall level of callbacks increases and differences between the treatment and control groups increase. Hence, in this particular experiment, it has small consequences for statistical power.

  14. Labour market competitiveness has been found to curb discrimination (Baert et al., 2015), although there is also evidence indicating otherwise (Carlsson et al., 2018).

  15. Confidence intervals are constructed from an inverted hypothesis test by computing a full schedule of potential outcomes under the sharp null hypothesis of no effect for all units and re-drawing 100,000 experiments in order to calculate the p-values and confidence intervals related to the differences (Gerber & Green, 2012).

  16. Note that this section is exploratory. I did not have a strong theory leading to expectations in specific directions a priori, and the heterogeneous effects explored in this section were not specified in the pre-registration plan.

  17. Both experiments build on roughly the same occupational categories and use the same outcome measure as well as almost identical applications and CVs, justifying their integration into a combined analysis. In Appendix C, I show how the results are aligned and use a precision-weighted estimate of the overlapping treatments to map.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Michael S. Gaddis, Arnfinn Midtboen, Peter Thisted Dinesen, Jonas Hansen, the participants at the IMISCOE Annual Meeting 2018, and the participants in the IWG seminar at UC Berkeley for their helpful comments on this paper. Kasper Arabi and Lotte Andersen deserve special thanks for their invaluable research assistance.

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This project has received funding from the Danish Institute for Human Rights.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Oester Farimagsgade 5, København K, DK-1353, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Malte Dahl

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Dahl, M. Alike but Different: How Cultural Distinctiveness Shapes Immigrant-Origin Minorities’ Access to the Labour Market. Int. Migration & Integration 23, 2269–2287 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-021-00844-y

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