Study: Muslim women face discrimination in German job market

A German study has found that female applicants who wear headscarves or have Turkish names have a harder time landing job interviews. Researchers found that women with both traits only had a callback rate of 4.2 percent.
A new study published the Germany-based Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) found that Muslim women face higher levels of discrimination when applying for jobs – even when the applications contain the same job qualifications.
For the field experiment, study author Doris Weichselbaumer sent out almost 1,500 fictional applications for office jobs in cities around Germany for one year.
One fake applicant had a typical German name, “Sandra Bauer” and featured a picture of a brunette woman. The second application used the same photo of the woman, but identified her with the Turkish-sounding name “Meryem Öztürk.”
The third application used the Turkish-sounding name but included a photo of the brunette woman wearing a headscarf. IZA noted that the application photograph “did not cover the applicant’s throat, thus signaling that she is not particularly strict with her religion.”
The applications never mentioned religion, but received wildly different results.
“Sandra Bauer” received an interview callback rate of 18.8 percent, followed by 13.5 percent for “Meryem Öztürk.”
However, the applicant who wore the headscarf only received a callback 4.2 percent of the time.
Researchers noted that a woman with a migrant background who also wears a headscarf would have to send 4.5 times as many applications to receive the same number of callbacks as an applicant with a German-sounding name.
Source: DW

Visit Us On TwitterVisit Us On Facebook