Negative attitudes of employers and labour market discrimination

In 2008, the Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU) published a study on the negative attitudes and stereotypesof employers and students towards Arab-Muslim men and obese individuals. The study’s findings reveal that employers have more negative attitudes towards Arab-Muslim men than Swedish men, and that they associate this population group as well as obese persons with a lower work performance.

Background

The concept of equal opportunities in the labour market implies that job applicants should be free to compete equally for jobs on the basis of merit. Moreover, they should not be discriminated against on the grounds of personal characteristics that are unrelated to job performance.

Research on discrimination in the labour market has traditionally focused on the explicitly subjective attitudes and stereotypes of employers towards a social group or an individual who is part of this group. This conscious discrimination occurs when an employer discriminates against an individual because of explicitly negative attitudes towards the social group to which the individual belongs. Discrimination based on stereotypical attitudes occurs when the employer believes that individuals belonging to this group are less suited to the job because of certain traits – such as, for example, low work performance.

However, more recent research is focusing on the notion of implicit prejudices which can lead to discriminatory attitudes among employers. In such instances, discrimination may operate on a subconscious level. This kind of research is valuable for understanding the selection of job applicants in recruitment processes: if employers demonstrate a substantial implicit prejudice towards certain individuals or ethnic groups, this could result in discrimination in the labour market.

About the study

On 10 January 2008, the Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation (Institutet för Arbetsmarknadspolitisk Utvärdering, IFAU) published a working paper on Ethnicity and obesity: evidence of implicit work performance stereotypes in Sweden (517Kb PDF). Carried out in 2007, the IFAU study aims to examine whether implicit prejudices, that could lead to discrimination, exist among employers towards Arab-Muslim men and obese individuals. A comparative group of students underwent the same tests as the employers. It is the first time that a study of this kind has been carried out in Sweden.

Implicit Association Test

In order to measure implicit attitudes and stereotypes, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) was used in the study. IAT is a computer-based test designed to measure individual differences in associations between concepts and attributes. The study’s participants – in this case, employers and students – were exposed to stimuli in the form of pictures and words. These stimuli were shown to the participants on a computer screen and they were asked to sort these into different categories. Different variations of pictures and words were presented to enable the test person to associate different concepts with each other – such as, for example, low performance with obesity.

During the test, the categories are switched and the test is repeated in five sessions. For each stimulus, the participant’s response time is measured. It is assumed that a shorter response time indicates that the person has implicit stereotypes. One such example is the belief that obese persons are more likely to underperform compared with people of normal weight. If a person takes more than 10 seconds to categorise the presented stimulus, it is assumed that the person is working out the right answer. A response time of less than 0.3 seconds for 10% or more of the test responses indicates totally random answers, and these responses are excluded from the test analysis. The response time for the stimuli presented must be between 0.3 and 10 seconds.

Measuring explicit attitudes and work performance stereotypes

The test also included measures of explicit attitudes and work performance stereotypes of the study participants. These were examined through experiments and included three types of measurements, namely the:

• ‘feeling thermometer’ – whereby participants were asked to rank their positive and negative feelings towards Arab-Muslim and Swedish men on a 10-point scale, with 1 indicating ‘very negative feelings’ and 10 denoting ‘very positive feelings’;

• ‘hiring preference task’ – whereby participants were asked to choose which groups they prefer when hiring people. For the ethnicity text, one of five alternatives had to be chosen, ranging from a strong preference for Arab-Muslim men relative to Swedish men, coded as -2, to a strong preference for Swedish men relative to Arab-Muslim men, coded as 2, with a neutral intermediate alternative coded as 0. In the case of the test regarding obese persons, the five alternatives were used to compare two groups – those of obese and normal weight;

• ‘performance stereotype rating’ – which was constructed in the same way as the hiring preference task, asking participants to indicate according to five categories how well Arab-Muslim and Swedish men, as well as obese and normal weight individuals, perform at work compared with each other.

Main findings

In the study, 193 employers performed the IAT measuring negative attitudes and work performance stereotypes towards Arab-Muslim men. A further 158 employers carried out the same IAT to unveil existing work performance stereotypes in relation to obese individuals. The same tests were performed among 175 students, some 87 of whom participated in the IAT measuring attitudes and stereotypes regarding Arab-Muslim men and 88 of whom participated in the set of tests measuring stereotypes about obese individuals.

Implicit negative attitudes and stereotypes

The IAT results show that an overwhelming majority of both employers and students show negative attitudes towards Arab-Muslim men and obese individuals. The majority of the test participants also associate these two groups of individuals with underperformance, compared with native Swedish men and men of normal weight.

About 76% of employers and 94% of students show at least initial signs of implicit prejudices – that is, negative attitudes and stereotypes – towards Arab-Muslim men and obese individuals, respectively.

Explicit prejudice

The test results measuring explicit prejudices towards Arab-Muslim men and obese individuals indicate lower scores. Therefore, these results could be less reliable than those of the IAT. This can be explained by the fact that people often have self-presentational strategies; in other words, employers in particular want to give a more socially desirable picture of their attitudes towards job applicants.

The feeling thermometer recorded a negative attitude towards Arab-Muslim men for 78% of the students, which almost corresponded to their implicit measure of negative attitudes and stereotypes (83%) towards the same group.

Some 94% of the employers surveyed showed at least a weak negative effect in the implicit measurement of their attitudes and stereotypes towards Arab-Muslim men. This result suggests the existence of implicitly negative attitudes and stereotypes towards this ethnic group. However, only about half of the employers (49%) expressed these negative attitudes and stereotypes explicitly.

Regarding the work performance stereotype rating in relation to Arab-Muslim men, about 10% of the employers expressed the view that this group underperforms compared with Swedish men. For the student group, this figure amounted to 23%. In the comparison between obese individuals and those of normal weight, 39% of the students surveyed and 25% of the employers claimed that normal weight persons perform better at work than obese individuals.

When it comes to hiring people, the majority of employers show a preference for hiring Swedish men (53%) and people of normal weight (58%), compared with Arab-Muslim men and obese individuals.

Commentary

This type of study could be very helpful in understanding the causal factors of discrimination in the labour market. In particular, if such studies link implicit stereotypes with explicit ones, it could help to explain how implicit factors contribute to discrimination, as the hiring process is frequently determined by more or less implicit values, attitudes and stereotypes.

This study is the first of its kind in Sweden which measures the implicit work performance stereotypes of certain population groups. It should therefore be regarded as a pilot study. However, since the number of test participants is rather low, the study’s results should be interpreted with caution in order to avoid any general conclusions.

Paul Andersson, Oxford Research