If two women, one Muslim and the other non-Muslim, come to the interview competing for the same position and both have the same resume, the first 37% less chance of being hired than the first. This is illustrated by a pioneering study examining employment discrimination for religious and cultural reasons in Spain, Germany and the Netherlands. The research also shows that while there is a statistically harmful bias for Muslim women in the three countries, it is more pronounced in Spain.
It was an intuition that researchers Mariña Fernández-Reino, Valentina Di Stasio, and Susanne Veit were able to scientifically verify, that people of foreign descent face prejudice and greater difficulty in competing on an equal footing with natives. Their research, published in the European Sociological Review, is for the first time detailed and comparative analysis Labor discrimination of Muslim women between different countries.
And its publication comes at a time when the Spanish Government has ratified a new treaty. immigration regulation reform facilitating access to an employment contract for persons with a migrant background. This will predictably result in the regular labor market integration of thousands of people of foreign origin, some of whom are Muslim women.
So far, there has been research on women who wear headscarves as more likely to work as salaried or self-employed compared to non-veiled Muslim women. Or, specific research in the case of Germany, which has a long tradition of immigration, has shown evidence that Turkish women are less likely to be employed than Germans of German descent. And this work brings the two together and scales them internationally: The difference between wearing a veil and not wearing a veil and it does it for three different countries.
While 25% of non-Muslim women who applied for job interviews in Spain succeeded in getting a job, this rate drops to 15.7% for Muslim women. This is the largest gap identified among the three economies analyzed by the authors, who stressed that there is almost no difference between headscarf-wearing and non-hijab-wearing Muslims. Both are less likely, equally in that sense. A religious component can be added to other biases of the compositional effect that the study did not specify.
More public exposure, more discrimination
Another result left by the study is the negative relationship between the Muslim religion and the religion of Islam. high public exposure. In other words, the more contact with clients is needed for the position, the less likely a Muslim woman will be to access the position. To the point where believers in Islam statistically have half the options of a culturally or religiously Christian person or other minority religions in Spain.
“Low response rate in Spain [entre todos los colectivos] reflects high competition for jobs in a high context unemployment“, the researchers point out. In Germany and the Netherlands, too, they have a better chance of finding a job, despite a harmful bias against Muslim women. With this ‘disabled’ they are even higher than for a non-Muslim woman in Spain. In Germany, 54% more they have more chances of finding a job and in the Netherlands there is 64% unemployment in vain Spain 12.5% and Germany 2.8% and the Netherlands 3.4% unemployment.
One finding that surprised the researchers was that discrimination against Muslim women who wear veils was similar to that in Germany in the Netherlands compared to those who didn’t. A finding they described as “somewhat unexpected given the traditionally stronger multiculturalism of the Dutch citizenship model and less negative attitudes towards veiling registered in the Netherlands”.