As part of the Horizon Europe project “European Labour Markets Under Pressure – New Knowledge on Pathways to Include Persons in Vulnerable Situations” (PATHS2INCLUDE) they have a vacancy at the Leibniz University Hannover for a postdoctoral position (100%) in the field of labour market and survey research to start on 1 March 2023. The application deadline is on 14th December 2022.
Over at the NCCR on the move blog, there’s a summary of research undertaken jointly with Eva Van Belle on CV Whitening. The blog post takes a step back and embeds considerations of CV Whitening in broader research on ethnic discrimination in the job market and the correspondence tests we use to measure discrimination.
In Western countries, we observe that some employers discriminate against people with a name indicating that they are from a minority group. Research has shown that if you have a name signalling that you are an ‘immigrant’ or belong to an ‘ethnic minority,’ the chances of being invited to a job interview are reduced. Factoring in the potential discrimination, some immigrants and members of ethnic minority groups have been observed to adopt strategies to hide details that show their minority status from their applications.
Correspondence tests have highlighted systematic discrimination in the labour market. In a correspondence test researchers create fictitious applications and send them to real employers and landlords. The applications are constructed in a way to highlight discriminatory practices in cases where minority applicants are invited less often to interviews. On average, applicants from non-neighbouring countries find it much harder to be invited to a job interview.
Considering the discrimination, ‘immigrants’ and members of ethnic minority groups have a clear incentive to hide details from their applications that make their minority statuses apparent. On the contrary, if an employer cannot tell that the applicant is an ‘immigrant’ or belongs to a minority group, the chances of getting invited to an interview have been noted to increase.
Blog post by Eva Van Belle over at the NCCR on the move on our meta-analysis and experiment on immigrant-native wage gaps:
People with a migration background face many barriers in the labour market. Research has shown that they have fewer chances of being invited for job interviews or being offered a promotion, and when they do get a job, they may well earn less or face worse working conditions. Much less is known about other forms of labour market discrimination, however. It seems therefore interesting to investigate whether immigrants face wage discrimination and whether people think this wage gap is fair.
Figure 1. Prevalence of résumé whitening by world region of birth and strategy of résumé Whitening. Switzerland, 2018. N=7659 recent immigrants. CC-by
In this article, Eva Van Belle and I examine how widespread so-called CV or résumé Whitening is. We know from correspondence studies that there is persistent hiring discrimination against ethnic minority candidates. With this, they have clear incentives to modify their CV or résumé so that signals of minority status are hidden.
We know that students at an elite university state that they would consider résumé Whitening techniques, but to date there was no study enumerating the actual use of résumé Whitening. We added a series of questions to the Migration-Mobility Survey to obtain a representative sample of recent immigrants in Switzerland (N=7,659).
Around 9% of the immigrants used one or more of the résumé Whitening techniques we asked. This seems to be done in reaction to the experience or anticipation of ethnic discrimination, as we can show.
Dr. Valentina Di Stasio is recruiting two PhD students who will join her team for the project TARGETS, funded by the European Research Council (ERC StG 2021), and starting in September 2022. The projects will be embedded within the ICS, the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology, and are based at ERCOMER (European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations), Utrecht University.
TARGETS is a multi-disciplinary and multi-method project bringing together insights from sociology, socio-legal studies, organizational and social psychology, management and organization studies, with the aim to understand the conditions under which people are recognized as targets of discrimination (both in the workplace and in the courtroom), and the strategies that members of vulnerable groups adopt to avoid becoming targets.
You can find more detailed information on the two PhD projects at these links:
Didier Ruedin 