Ethnic Stereotypes and Entry into Labor Market Programs

Mahmood Arai, Marie Gartell, Magnus Rödin and Gülay Özcan

ILR Review, 2021, vol. 74, issue 2, 293-320

Abstract: The authors examine the impact of ethnic bias based on public employment officers’ decisions when choosing whom to recommend for participation in a labor market program. On the basis of an experiment that uses job seekers’ own portrait photographs, their recorded voices, and their real names, findings show that when recommending job seekers for labor market programs, female caseworkers are not affected by job seekers’ appearance, but male caseworkers favor job seekers who are perceived to have a stereotypical Swedish appearance. Moreover, the authors find that, as intended by the guidelines of the Swedish Public Employment Service, both male and female caseworkers favor job seekers perceived, based on the job seekers’ recorded voice, to have a foreign background. The authors’ conclusions suggest that when no explicit guidelines are provided for addressing the impact of ethnic stereotypes on selection for training programs, a risk of bias based on ethnic stereotypes of physical appearance exists.

Keywords: ethnic discrimination; ethnic stereotypes; racial discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793919899937 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ilrrev:v:74:y:2021:i:2:p:293-320

DOI: 10.1177/0019793919899937

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().