Table 1 - uploaded by Eva Zschirnt
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Names used in the correspondence test Origin Female Male
Source publication
The extent to which discrimination in employment disadvantages children of immigrants is a major question both in economic research on labour market and in sociological studies of integration. This working paper contributes to the debate by reporting findings of a correspondence test in which pairs of equally qualified Swiss citizens – one from the...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... all combinations of names were looked up on Facebook, to see if they existed (i.e. were plausible) and whether numerous profiles with these names existed, so that employers would not be able to immediately identify a candidate. Table 1 provides an overview of the names used in this correspondence test. Our study reveals whether hiring discrimination turns Swiss citizens holding immigrant-sounding names and dual citizenship into 'ethnic' minorities. ...
Context 2
... few redundancies that this choice of a meticulous presentation entail are largely compensated by a more transparent message. All the tables have strictly the same structure (following Zschirnt 2018), detailed in the legend of Table 1 and thoroughly discussed in the first subchapter. ...
Similar publications
This study highlights the recent changes in the composition of the Western European immigrant population to the United States. This research examines the growing diversity of this migratory stream, investigating seven groups of immigrants from Western Europe to the US. Findings show that individuals who were born in Western Europe but whose familie...
Citations
... Moreover, they are subjected to discriminatory practices, such as a lower income (Gomensoro and Bolzman 2019). Zschirnt and Fibbi (2019) also observed more unemployment (10 per cent on average) and higher risks/periods of unemployment for second-generation residents with a Kosovan background when entering the labour market (Guarin and Rousseaux 2017), as well as for the second-generation with a Portuguese, former-Yugoslavian or Turkish background during the first stage of their professional career up to 30 years old (Gomensoro and Bolzman 2019). ...
... Secondly, the strong relationship that exists between parents' level of education and their nationality (migrants with low levels of educational capital were recruited in poorer countries than Switzerland) can also mask the specific role of the latter on their children's educational and professional trajectory. It also means that to study the role of ethnic and national background more specific research design and methods are needed as shown among others in Switzerland by Fibbi, Lerch, and Wanner (2006) and Zschirnt and Fibbi (2019) or more generally by Bulmer and Solomos (2004). ...
... In Switzerland, studies show discrimination in the labor market especially affects secondgeneration immigrants (Fibbi et al., 2006;Zschirnt, 2020;Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019). Two experimental studies conducted in the French-speaking and German-speaking parts of Switzerland used fictious candidates, who differed only by country of origin, to apply to job advertisements (Fibbi et al., 2006;Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019). ...
... In Switzerland, studies show discrimination in the labor market especially affects secondgeneration immigrants (Fibbi et al., 2006;Zschirnt, 2020;Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019). Two experimental studies conducted in the French-speaking and German-speaking parts of Switzerland used fictious candidates, who differed only by country of origin, to apply to job advertisements (Fibbi et al., 2006;Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019). Young people from non-EU countries holding Swiss qualifications face more discrimination compared to Swiss-born candidates: they need to send 30% more applications to receive the invitation an interview (Fibbi et al., 2006;Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019). ...
... Two experimental studies conducted in the French-speaking and German-speaking parts of Switzerland used fictious candidates, who differed only by country of origin, to apply to job advertisements (Fibbi et al., 2006;Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019). Young people from non-EU countries holding Swiss qualifications face more discrimination compared to Swiss-born candidates: they need to send 30% more applications to receive the invitation an interview (Fibbi et al., 2006;Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019). ...
Purpose
Islamophobia is a growing social problem that leads to the discrimination of Muslims. Using Group Conflict Theory and the Integrated Threat Theory as the theoretical frameworks, this study aims to measure the presence of Islamophobia in the hiring practices of the most southern state of Switzerland.
Design/methodology/approach
An experimental formative research study was conducted with employees. Based on CVs for two positions, back-office and front-office, candidates were selected for interviews and reasons were provided. Two variables were manipulated to represent the “Muslim appearance” on the CVs: the picture and the name. A content analysis of reasons was conducted in addition to descriptive statistics of survey responses.
Findings
A negative perception of Muslim candidates emerged from the answers with a clear difference between the two scenarios: candidates perceived to be Muslim were not rejected from the back-office position, but they were from the front-office position.
Social implications
Results demonstrate that hiring practices in Ticino Switzerland are, in some cases, based on a prejudicial attitude. As long as Muslims were “not seen as Muslims to the customers,” they were judged as acceptable for the job. This has implications for social marketing research and practice aimed to change this discrimination behavior. A next step could be to understand if it is fear of Muslims or fear of what the public might think of Muslims that cause the selection difference between the two jobs. Systems-wide and macro level social marketing research is well suited to investigate such problems and test solutions, in a local context, following the methodology used in this study.
Originality/value
A disturbing escalation of the phenomenon of Islamophobia has emerged across the globe. This paper examines a fundamental issue in equity and prosperity, which is equal opportunity for employment. Using experimental design, the authors find that discrimination exists in hiring practices, which is a problem that social marketing is well equipped to address.
... In Europe, it is individuals from an immigration background who represent ethnic minorities. For instance, prior work showed that despite being dual citizens and holding Swiss degrees, children of first-generation immigrant parents in Switzerland needed to send 30% more applications than children of native Swiss parents to be called back for an apprenticeship interview, which may be explained by the non-Swiss-sounding names on their resumes (Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019/20). ...
While STEM occupational turnover constitutes a major concern for society given the importance of innovation and technology in today’s global economy, it also represents an opportunity to achieve career sustainability for individuals. There is ample research on the reasons why students drop out from STEM education, but evidence on STEM professionals’ career patterns and on correlates of occupational turnover after graduation is scarce. Drawing on the sustainable careers framework, the current study examines how STEM graduates’ careers evolve over time, revealing diverse patterns of occupational turnover and the relationships of such career patterns with work diversity characteristics in terms of sex and ethnic minority status, career success, and self‐employment. Using longitudinal data from 1,512 STEM graduates over ten years, results of an optimal matching analysis demonstrate six career patterns that can be distinguished into three continuity (STEM, part‐STEM, non‐STEM) and three change (hybrid, boomerang, dropout) sustainable career patterns. We find differences in sex, but not in ethnic minority status, across career patterns. Further, professionals who change from STEM occupations to non‐STEM occupations show higher objective career success and are more often self‐employed than those following a continuous STEM career pattern. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
... Studies held in Switzerland have shown how ethnic discrimination occurs in recruitment processes, a practice that also concerns Swiss nationals with a migration background (Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019). This bias against foreigners or people perceived as non-Swiss (because of their name, skin color or dual citizenship) is understood as a strong contextual challenge by the CSOs aiming at the migrants' labor integration. ...
This article presents a qualitative analysis of the practices of civil society organizations (CSOs) to integrate migrants into the Swiss labor market. Civil society organizations as a means of overcoming vulnerability figure prominently in the current research. However, less attention has been given to examining how organizational perceptions influence their behavior in the face of threats. Our findings illustrate that political and economic changes in the migration field result in various forms of organizational vulnerability, manifesting as internal challenges to organizations' sense-making, identification of beneficiaries and the type of services they provide. We show that CSOs negotiate diverse roles in the labor integration of migrants embedded in a dynamic system of interdependence with state institutions and labor market actors. Hence, CSOs constantly adapt and respond to challenges in the field, showing a range of resilience practices ensuring their role as key driver of migrants’ labor integration.
... Furthermore, we find that discriminatory hiring is prevalent among different types of recruiters (Extended Data Fig. 3a, b). When benchmarking our results to a correspondence study that collected data at a similar time in the same labour market 14 , we find that the penalties estimated with our approach are slightly smaller (see Extended Data Table 1). Together, these results confirm and generalize the findings from correspondence studies that focus on select ethnic or racial groups in a few occupations. ...
... Extended Data Table 1 | Comparison of ethnic penalties with estimates from a contemporaneous correspondence study Our estimates of ethnic discrimination (columns 1 and 2) are compared with those reported by Zschirnt and Fibbi 14 (column 3) in a previous correspondence study in Switzerland between October 2017 and October 2018. To replicate that sample as closely as possible, the ethnic penalties in columns 1 and 2 are estimated for the same ethnicities, the same gender and in the same occupations as the jobseeker profiles in the Zschirnt and Fibbi study 14 : sales assistants (male and female applicants), electricians (male applicants only), nurses (female applicants only) and HR clerks (male and female applicants). In the correspondence test, an ethnic background was indicated by the names of jobseekers. ...
Women (compared to men) and individuals from minority ethnic groups (compared to the majority group) face unfavourable labour market outcomes in many economies1,2, but the extent to which discrimination is responsible for these effects, and the channels through which they occur, remain unclear3,4. Although correspondence tests⁵—in which researchers send fictitious CVs that are identical except for the randomized minority trait to be tested (for example, names that are deemed to sound ‘Black’ versus those deemed to sound ‘white’)—are an increasingly popular method to quantify discrimination in hiring practices6,7, they can usually consider only a few applicant characteristics in select occupations at a particular point in time. To overcome these limitations, here we develop an approach to investigate hiring discrimination that combines tracking of the search behaviour of recruiters on employment websites and supervised machine learning to control for all relevant jobseeker characteristics that are visible to recruiters. We apply this methodology to the online recruitment platform of the Swiss public employment service and find that rates of contact by recruiters are 4–19% lower for individuals from immigrant and minority ethnic groups, depending on their country of origin, than for citizens from the majority group. Women experience a penalty of 7% in professions that are dominated by men, and the opposite pattern emerges for men in professions that are dominated by women. We find no evidence that recruiters spend less time evaluating the profiles of individuals from minority ethnic groups. Our methodology provides a widely applicable, non-intrusive and cost-efficient tool that researchers and policy-makers can use to continuously monitor hiring discrimination, to identify some of the drivers of discrimination and to inform approaches to counter it.
... Field experiments on the labor market a powerful method to test for discrimination against foreign named candidates in hiring decisions. In the experiments conducted in Switzerland, fictitious paired applications, which differed only in the origin of the candidates (one native Swiss, one with a migration background -German or French, Kosovar, Turkish, or Cameroonian), were sent during the period from October 2017 to December 2018 in response to a total of 1,173 job vacancies for sales assistants, electricians, nurses and HR clerks, that had been posted on online job search platforms all across Switzerland, with the exception of the small Italian speaking region (for details on the correspondence tests see Fibbi et al. 2020, Zschirnt 2018, Zschirnt and Fibbi 2019. ...
Correspondence tests on ethnic discrimination in the labor market usually focus on how often native majority candidates and ethnic minority candidates are invited for job interviews on an aggregated level. Cases in which only minority candidates are invited for an interview have mostly been disregarded as noise and not analyzed further. In this paper, we argue that employers who prefer minority over majority candidates may have good reasons to do so. We propose several theoretical mechanisms that explain why it would be desirable to hire individuals with a non-native background and test these expectations quantitatively with correspondence test data that was collected in Switzerland between October 2017 and December 2018. We find partial support for our expectations: in particular, in urban and thus likely more international firm settings; and among owners doing the recruitment themselves in the context of small enterprises, where close supervision is possible, we identified employers who are more willing to “take the risk” and to invite only minority applicants for a job interview. We argue that employer behavior is likely to be complex and that research should analyze instances of minority preferences more systematically.
... Besides the different migration patterns, the distinctive historical and political developments of these countries should not be underestimated in the analysis of etiological assumptions about suffering and trauma among this population. Several studies in Switzerland and Germany have shown that migrants of Albanian or Kosovan origin are the most exposed to labour market discrimination (Koopmans et al., 2013;Zschirnt and Fibbi, 2019). Further, several studies have shown that it is a distinct characteristic of Albanian individuals that the needs of family members are put above one's own needs (Dow, 2011;Heigl et al., 2011;Shala et al., 2020). ...
Background
Internet- and mobile-based mental health interventions have the potential to narrow the treatment gap in ethnic groups. Little evidence exists on the cultural adaptation of such interventions. Cultural adaptation of evidence-based interventions distinguishes between surface and deep structure adaptation. Surface refers to matching materials (e.g., illustrations, language) or methods of treatment delivery to the target population, whereas deep structure adaptation considers cultural concepts of distress (CCD). So far, CCD have only been considered to a limited extent in cultural adaptation of psychological interventions, and there is a lack of well documented adaptation procedures.
Aims
With a cross-disciplinary and mixed-method approach, following a new conceptual framework for cultural adaptation of scalable psychological interventions, this study aimed to develop both surface and deep structure adaptations of an internet- and mobile-based intervention called Hap-pas-Hapi for the treatment of psychological distress among Albanian migrants in Switzerland and Germany.
Methods
A qualitative ethnopsychological study was conducted to examine the target group’s CCD. Focus group discussions, an online survey, and individual key informant interviews were utilised to evaluate the original intervention, adaptation drafts and the final adapted intervention. A reporting system was developed to support the decision-making process and to report all adaptations in a transparent and replicable way.
Results
The ongoing involvement of target population stakeholders provided valuable feedback for the development of a more person-centred intervention, which might enhance treatment acceptance, motivation and adherence.
Discussion
This study provides empirical and theory-based considerations and suggestions for future implementation that may foster acceptability and effectiveness of culturally adapted evidence-based interventions.
... These findings are consistent with a similar test carried out recently by Zschirnt and Fibbi (2019). Their research shows that children of immigrants holding Swiss qualifications and dual nationality need to send 30% more applications to receive a call-back for an interview when applying for apprenticeship level occupations. ...
“Migrants Unbound?” includes a selection of papers written in the last ten years (2009-2019) during which I have been affiliated to Swiss academic institutions. They have been updated and edited for this publication. They have been also enriched with a selection of photographic/ethnographic materials collected all over Europe and beyond in more than twenty years of research on international migration. The idea behind the present collection is to make full value of comparative research carried out both from a theoretical or empirical perspective on different categories of migrants from the elderly to second generation and from low to highly skilled, originating from a variety of regions and geographical contexts. They come from the Sub-Saharan African region as well as Western and Eastern Europe presently living on the European continent.
... Among them are demographic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, parenthood); economic, social or legal capital; or structural labour-market characteristics, such as varying job opportunities depending on where people live (Kogan, 2006;Sacchi, Kriesi, & Buchmann, 2016). In addition, specific groups of foreign origin may experience discrimination in the labour market (Bolzman, 2011;Ebner & Helbling, 2016;Fibbi et al., 2006;Guarin & Rousseaux, 2017;Heath & Cheung, 2007a, Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019 and/or socalled "ethnic penalties". ...
... Unfortunately, recent studies on upper-secondary certification at age 25 (BFS, 2018a) and on the employment situation at age 30 fail to take country of origin or nationality into account. Previous research indicates that a substantial proportion of first-and second-generation young adults from the successor countries of former Yugoslavia, Turkey and Portugal face discrimination and greater difficulties with regard to labour-market integration (Bolzman, 2011;Fibbi et al., 2006Fibbi et al., , 2015Guarin & Rousseaux, 2017, Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019. ...
... About 50% of them continue to work in their training company, and 85% have found gainful employment within three months after graduation (BFS, 2018b). Once again, some ethnic groups (from former Yugoslavia, Turkey and Portugal) are found to be discriminated against when looking for jobs after obtaining a VET certificate (Bolzman, 2011;Fibbi et al., 2006, 2003, Zschirnt & Fibbi, 2019. Thus, unemployment rates of young people of Turkish or Kosovar origin are five and three times higher, respectively, than the rate among Swiss natives, even when controlling for a number of educational and labour market factors (Guarin & Rousseaux, 2017). ...
Migration during childhood has a negative impact on educational outcomes. As a result, migrant youths enter the labour market with lower educational assets and experience obstacles and delayed transitions. Even so, little is known about later labour-market outcomes of youth who migrated to Switzerland during childhood and attended post-compulsory education there. Are there differences with respect to the labour-market outcomes for these young adults, and do these differences persist once we account for educational attainment and other relevant characteristics? For a longitudinal analysis of these research questions, we draw on panel data of the first TREE (TRansitions from Education to Employment) cohort. With reference to descriptives of their educational and labour market situation, we propose a number of explanatory models to predict the effect of migration characteristics while controlling for relevant characteristics including educational attainment. We consider the effect of three variables related to migration: respondents' country of birth, respondents' nationality and parental country of birth. Our results show that, in a longitudinal perspective, those who migrated during childhood experience higher risk of unemployment, are to be found in lower occupational positions and have lower incomes than native youths. While some differences can be explained by the lower level of education of those born abroad, this is not the case for other differences such as income differentials. Moreover, some effects vary by type of migration characteristics (respondent's country of birth, parental country of birth and respondent's nationality) or appear only in a longitudinal perspective , thereby underlining the necessity of framing migration multi-dimensionally and relying on panel data.
Dans le monde urbain actuel, caractérisé par une forte mobilité et un contact accru avec le plurilinguisme et la pluriculturalité, nous explorons comment ces facteurs influencent les représentations sociales et les attitudes envers les communautés minoritaires. Notre étude sociolinguistique, menée dans le contexte genevois, vise à comprendre l’effet du plurilinguisme natif sur la perception de la parole de locuteurs vus comme issus de l’immigration. Nous analysons les réactions de trois groupes d’auditeurs francophones natifs : monolingues, bilingues, et bilingues arabophones. En utilisant la technique du locuteur masqué (MGT) légèrement adaptée à notre méthode, nous observons le stéréotypage linguistique inversé (RLS) à travers l’évaluation d’extraits sonores associés à des profils fictifs, chacun composé d’une photo, d’un nom propre et d’un lieu de naissance. Nos résultats suggèrent que ce plurilinguisme et une ouverture à la diversité culturelle conduisent à des attitudes plus positives, se traduisant par une plus grande tolérance et familiarité, envers les locuteurs perçus comme non natifs. Par ailleurs, ils révèlent l’impact significatif des idéologies linguistiques et nationalistes, variant selon le statut de citoyenneté des participants, dans la formation de ces attitudes.