case study about discrimination in employment

• Find a Lawyer
• Ask a Lawyer
• Research the Law
• Law Schools
• Laws & Regs
• Newsletters
• Justia Connect
• Pro Membership
• Basic Membership
• Justia Lawyer Directory
• Platinum Placements
• Gold Placements
• Justia Elevate
• Justia Amplify
• PPC Management
• Google Business Profile
• Social Media
• Justia Onward Blog

Labor & Employment Supreme Court Cases

Many of the labor and employment cases that have reached the Supreme Court involve claims of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation in the workplace. These may arise under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits adverse employment actions based on the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of an employee. The Supreme Court also has reviewed cases under parallel anti-discrimination laws, such as the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

Meanwhile, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 imposes rules for pension, health, and other benefit plans in the private sector. The Supreme Court has clarified ERISA terms and requirements, in addition to determining whether ERISA preempts various state laws. The ERISA preemption clause provides that the law supersedes any state laws to the extent that they relate to employee benefit plans. However, the ERISA savings clause allows states to regulate the business of insurance.

Other workplace issues addressed by the Supreme Court include employee privacy, wage and hour rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the free speech rights of government employees. The Court also has discussed the use of arbitration to resolve labor and employment disputes.

Below is a selection of Supreme Court cases involving labor and employment, arranged from newest to oldest.

Author: Clarence Thomas

The traditional four-factor test for a preliminary injunction governs NLRB requests for a preliminary injunction from a federal district court while administrative enforcement proceedings take place.

Author: Elena Kagan

Although an employee must show some harm from a forced job transfer to prevail in a Title VII claim, they do not need to show that the injury satisfies a significance test.

Author: Samuel A. Alito, Jr.

Title VII requires an employer that denies a religious accommodation to show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business. The impact on coworkers is relevant only to the extent that it goes on to affect the conduct of the business.

Author: Neil Gorsuch

An employer that fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII.

The federal-sector provision of the ADEA demands that personnel actions be untainted by any consideration of age.

The state's extraction of agency fees from non-consenting public-sector employees violates the First Amendment.

Author: Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Dodd-Frank's anti-retaliation provision does not extend to an individual who has not reported a violation of the securities laws to the SEC.

Author: Stephen Breyer

When an employer demotes an employee out of a desire to prevent the employee from engaging in protected political activity, the employee is entitled to challenge that unlawful action under the First Amendment and Section 1983 even if the employer's actions are based on a factual mistake about the employee's behavior.

Author: Anthony Kennedy

ERISA preempts a state law that governs or interferes with the uniformity of plan administration.

Author: Antonin Scalia

To prevail in a disparate treatment claim, an applicant needs to show only that their need for an accommodation was a motivating factor in the employer's decision. They do not need to show that the employer had knowledge of their need.

Time spent waiting to undergo and undergoing security screenings is not compensable under the FLSA.

Author: Sonia Sotomayor

A public employee's sworn testimony outside the scope of their ordinary job duties is entitled to First Amendment protection.

Title VII retaliation claims must be proved according to traditional principles of but-for causation.

An employee is a supervisor for the purposes of vicarious liability under Title VII only if they are empowered by the employer to take tangible employment actions against the victim.

Author: John Roberts

The Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses bar lawsuits brought on behalf of ministers against their churches, claiming termination in violation of employment discrimination laws.

A government employer's allegedly retaliatory actions against an employee do not give rise to liability under the Petition Clause of the First Amendment unless the employee's petition relates to a matter of public concern.

In an employment discrimination class action, the conceptual gap between an individual's discrimination claim and the existence of a class of persons who have suffered the same injury must be bridged by significant proof that an employer operated under a general policy of discrimination. More generally, a class in a proposed class action has common questions of law or fact if their claims depend on a common contention of such a nature that it is capable of classwide resolution, which means that determination of its truth or falsity will resolve an issue that is central to the validity of each of the claims in one stroke.

If a supervisor performs an act motivated by discriminatory animus that is intended by the supervisor to cause an adverse employment action, and if that act is a proximate cause of the ultimate employment action, the employer is liable.

A government employer had a right to read text messages sent and received on a pager that the employer owned and issued to an employee.

Before an employer can engage in intentional discrimination for the asserted purpose of avoiding or remedying an unintentional disparate impact, the employer must have a strong basis in evidence to believe that it will be subject to disparate impact liability if it fails to take the race-conscious, discriminatory action.

A plaintiff bringing an ADEA disparate treatment claim must prove that age was the but-for cause of the adverse employment action.

A provision in a collective bargaining agreement that clearly and unmistakably requires union members to arbitrate ADEA claims is enforceable as a matter of federal law.

Author: David Souter

An employer defending a disparate impact claim under the ADEA bears both the burden of production and the burden of persuasion for the “reasonable factors other than age” (RFOA) affirmative defense.

The anti-retaliation provision of Title VII covers only those employer actions that would have been materially adverse to a reasonable employee or applicant. The plaintiff must show that the challenged action well might have dissuaded a reasonable worker from making or supporting a charge of discrimination.

When public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.

Author: John Paul Stevens

When employees must don protective clothing on the employer's premises before they engage in the productive labor for which they are primarily hired, the time that employees spend walking between the changing area and the production area is compensable under the FLSA. However, the time that employees spend waiting to put on the protective gear is not compensable.

While the ADEA authorizes recovery in disparate impact cases, ADEA Section 4(f)(1) significantly narrows its coverage by permitting any otherwise prohibited action when the differentiation is based on reasonable factors other than age.

ERISA prevents individuals from suing HMOs in state court for pure eligibility decisions. Also, if an individual at some point in time could have brought their claim under ERISA Section 502(a)(1)(B), and no other independent legal duty is implicated by a defendant's actions, the individual's cause of action is completely preempted.

A plaintiff alleging sexual harassment can establish constructive discharge if they can show that the abusive working environment became so intolerable that their resignation qualified as a fitting response. An employer may assert the Faragher affirmative defense unless the plaintiff quit in reasonable response to an adverse action officially changing their employment status or situation.

Direct evidence of discrimination is not required for a plaintiff to obtain a mixed motive jury instruction under Title VII.

The common-law element of control is the principal guidepost to be followed in deciding whether director-shareholder physicians in a medical clinic should be counted as employees for the purposes of the ADA. Factors to be considered in deciding whether a shareholder-director is an employee include whether the organization can hire or fire the individual or set rules for their work, whether the organization supervises their work, whether they report to someone higher in the organization, whether they can influence the organization, whether written agreements or contracts show that the parties intended the individual to be an employee, and whether the individual shares in the profits, losses, and liabilities of the organization.

HMOs may be insurers and thus subject to state regulation of insurers. State laws directed toward the insurance industry are saved from preemption under ERISA's saving clause.

An agreement between an employer and an employee to arbitrate employment-related disputes does not bar the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from pursuing victim-specific judicial relief, such as backpay, reinstatement, and damages, in an ADA enforcement action.

Author: Per Curiam

Judicial review of a labor arbitration decision pursuant to a collective bargaining agreement is very limited. Courts are not authorized to review an arbitrator's decision on the merits despite allegations that the decision rests on factual errors or misinterprets the parties' agreement. Even when the arbitrator's award may properly be vacated, the appropriate remedy is to remand the case for further arbitration proceedings.

A retaliation claim will not withstand a summary judgment motion when nobody could reasonably believe that the incident of which the plaintiff complained violated Title VII.

The exemption in Section 1 of the Federal Arbitration Act, which excludes contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce, is confined to transportation workers.

Author: Sandra Day O’Connor

A prima facie case of discrimination, combined with sufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to reject the employer's non-discriminatory explanation for its decision, may be adequate to sustain a finding of liability for intentional discrimination under the ADEA.

Mixed treatment and eligibility decisions by health maintenance organization (HMO) physicians are not fiduciary decisions under ERISA.

An employer's conduct does not need to be independently egregious to satisfy the requirements for a punitive damages award in a Title VII case. However, in the punitive damages context, an employer may not be vicariously liable for the discriminatory employment decisions of managerial agents when these decisions are contrary to the employer's good-faith efforts to comply with Title VII.

For a union to waive employees' rights to a federal judicial forum for statutory anti-discrimination claims, the agreement to arbitrate these claims must be clear and unmistakable.

An employer is subject to vicarious liability to a victimized employee for an actionable hostile environment created by a supervisor with immediate or successively higher authority over the employee. When no tangible employment action is taken, the employer may raise an affirmative defense if they can show that they exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly any sexually harassing behavior, and the plaintiff unreasonably failed to take advantage of any preventive or corrective opportunities provided by the employer or to avoid harm otherwise.

Under Title VII, an employee who refuses the unwelcome and threatening sexual advances of a supervisor, yet suffers no adverse, tangible job consequences, may recover damages from the employer without showing that the employer was negligent or otherwise at fault for the supervisor's actions, but the employer may interpose an affirmative defense. (The defense consists of the elements in Faragher below.)

Sex discrimination consisting of same-sex sexual harassment is actionable under Title VII.

The power to amend or abolish an employee welfare benefit plan does not include the power to discriminate against the plan's participants and beneficiaries for the purpose of interfering with their attainment of rights under the plan.

The salary-basis test denies exempt status under the Fair Labor Standards Act when employees are covered by a policy that permits disciplinary or other deductions in pay as a practical matter. That standard is met if there is either an actual practice of making such deductions or an employment policy that creates a significant likelihood of such deductions.

When employers or other plan sponsors adopt, modify, or terminate pension plans, they do not act as fiduciaries but are analogous to settlors of a trust.

The fact that one member of a protected class lost out to another member is irrelevant to an employment discrimination claim so long as they lost out because of their protected trait.

A law operating as an indirect source of merely economic influence on administrative decisions should not suffice to trigger ERISA preemption.

An employee discharged in violation of the ADEA is not barred from all relief when, after their discharge, their employer discovers evidence of wrongdoing that, in any event, would have led to their termination on lawful and legitimate grounds had the employer known of it.

Title VII is violated when the workplace is permeated with discriminatory behavior that is sufficiently severe or pervasive to create a discriminatorily hostile or abusive working environment. This standard requires an objectively hostile or abusive environment, as well as the victim's subjective perception that the environment is abusive.

An employment decision based on years of service is not necessarily age-based, since this factor is analytically distinct from age.

The common-law test for determining who qualifies as an employee under ERISA considers the hiring party's right to control the manner and means by which the product is accomplished. Other factors to consider include the skill required, the source of the instrumentalities and tools, the location of the work, the duration of the relationship between the parties, the extent of the hired party's discretion over when and how long to work, and the method of payment, among others.

Author: Byron White

An ADEA claim can be subjected to compulsory arbitration.

ERISA's deemer clause demonstrates Congress' clear intent to exclude from the reach of the saving clause self-funded ERISA plans by relieving them from state laws purporting to regulate insurance. State laws directed toward such plans are preempted because they relate to an employee benefit plan but are not saved because they do not regulate insurance.

The proper comparison in a disparate impact employment discrimination case is generally between the racial composition of the at-issue jobs and the racial composition of the qualified population in the relevant labor market.

Author: William Brennan

In the specific context of sex stereotyping, an employer that acts on the basis of a belief that a woman cannot be aggressive, or that she must not be, has acted on the basis of gender.

A policy of paying discharged employees for their unused vacation time does not constitute an employee welfare benefit plan within the meaning of ERISA, and a criminal action to enforce that policy is not foreclosed.

For disclosure purposes, a “participant” in an ERISA plan means an employee in currently covered employment (or reasonably expected to be in currently covered employment), or a former employee who has a reasonable expectation of returning to covered employment or who has a colorable claim to vested benefits. To establish that they may become eligible for benefits, a claimant must have a colorable claim that they will prevail in a suit for benefits, or that eligibility requirements will be fulfilled in the future.

The National Labor Relations Act does not permit a union, over the objections of dues-paying non-member employees, to expend funds collected from them on activities unrelated to collective bargaining activities.

Disparate impact analysis in an employment discrimination claim may be applied to subjective employment criteria.

To be preempted by ERISA, a state statute must have some connection with or reference to a plan.

ERISA preempts state common law tort and contract actions asserting improper processing of a claim for benefits under an insured employee benefit plan.

Both the inception and the scope of the intrusion must be reasonable when a public employer intrudes on the constitutionally protected privacy interests of government employees for non-investigatory, work-related purposes, as well as for investigations of work-related misconduct.

Author: William Rehnquist

A claim of hostile environment sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that is actionable under Title VII.

Author: Harry Blackmun

A law relates to an employee benefit plan for ERISA purposes if it has a connection with or reference to such a plan.

When a public employee speaks as an employee on matters only of personal interest, a federal court is generally not the appropriate forum to review the wisdom of a personnel decision taken by a public agency allegedly in reaction to the employee's behavior.

A non-job-related test that has a disparate impact and is used to limit or classify employees is used to discriminate within the meaning of Title VII, even if it was not designed or intended to have this effect and even if an employer tries to compensate for its discriminatory effect.

Author: Lewis Powell

When a plaintiff in a Title VII case has proved a prima facie case of employment discrimination, the defendant bears only the burden of explaining clearly the non-discriminatory reasons for its actions. It is sufficient if the defendant's evidence raises a genuine issue of fact as to whether it discriminated against the plaintiff.

Author: Potter Stewart

A regulation could permit private employees of a private employer to avoid workplace conditions that they believe pose grave dangers to their own safety, when the employees have no power under the regulation to order their employer to correct the hazardous condition or to clear the dangerous workplace of others.

A public employee does not forfeit their First Amendment protection when they arrange to communicate privately with their employer, rather than expressing their views publicly.

To establish a prima facie case of employment discrimination, a plaintiff need only show that facially neutral standards select applicants for hire in a significantly discriminatory pattern. If the employer proves that the challenged requirements are job-related, the plaintiff may show that other selection devices without a similar discriminatory effect would also serve the employer's legitimate interest in efficient and trustworthy workmanship.

Once a prima facie case has been established by statistical workforce disparities, the employer must have an opportunity to show that the claimed discriminatory pattern was a product of pre-Title VII hiring, rather than unlawful post-Title VII discrimination.

In cases alleging a pattern or practice of employment discrimination, the government must show that discrimination was the standard operating procedure of the defendant. Statistics may be used in proving discrimination.

An employee's statutory right to trial de novo under Title VII is not foreclosed by prior submission of their claim to final arbitration under the non-discrimination clause of a collective bargaining agreement.

In a private, non-class action complaint under Title VII charging racial employment discrimination, the complainant has the burden of establishing a prima facie case, which they can satisfy by showing that they belong to a racial minority, they applied and were qualified for a job that the employer was trying to fill, they were rejected, and the employer continued to seek applicants with their qualifications.

Author: Warren Burger

An employment practice that operates to exclude members of a protected group is prohibited if it cannot be shown to be related to job performance, even if the employer lacked discriminatory intent.

Author: Thurgood Marshall

When a public employee's false statements concerned issues that were currently the subject of public attention and did not interfere with the performance of their duties or the general operation of their employer, they were entitled to the same protection as if the statements had been made by a member of the general public.

Author: Robert H. Jackson

Rulings, interpretations, and opinions of agency administrators are not controlling on courts but provide a body of experience and informed judgment that courts can use for guidance. The weight of such a judgment depends on the thoroughness evident in its consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors that give it power to persuade, if lacking power to control. Also, no principle of law precludes a determination that waiting time is working time under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The fact that an employer has individual contracts of employment with a majority of its employees does not preclude the employees from exercising their right under the National Labor Relations Act to choose a representative for collective bargaining, nor does it warrant refusal by the employer to bargain with this representative regarding terms covered by the individual contracts.

Author: Charles Evans Hughes

In recognizing the right to strike, the National Labor Relations Act contemplates a lawful strike. When a strike, even if it arose from unfair labor practices, is initiated and conducted in lawlessness by the seizure and retention of the employer's property, and the strikers are discharged because of their lawlessness, they do not remain employees under the NLRA.

A restraint or regulation of the liberty to contract is due process if it is reasonable in relation to its subject and adopted for the protection of the community against evils menacing the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people. Also, in dealing with the relation of employer and employed, the legislature has a wide field of discretion in order that there may be suitable protection of health and safety, and that peace and good order may be promoted through regulations designed to ensure wholesome conditions of work and freedom from oppression.

Author: George Sutherland

Legislation fixing hours or conditions of work may properly take into account the physical differences between men and women, but the doctrine that women of mature age require (or may be subjected to) restrictions on their liberty of contract that could not lawfully be imposed on men in similar circumstances must be rejected.

Author: David Josiah Brewer

The regulation of the working hours of women falls within the police power of the state, and a statute directed exclusively to such regulation does not conflict with the Due Process or Equal Protection Clauses.

Author: John Marshall Harlan

It is not within the power of Congress to make it a criminal offense against the United States for a carrier engaged in interstate commerce to discharge an employee simply because of their membership in a labor organization. A provision to that effect is an invasion of personal liberty and the right of property and is unenforceable under the Due Process Clause.

A U.S. court has no jurisdiction under the Thirteenth Amendment or other federal laws of a charge of conspiracy made and carried out in a state to prevent citizens of African descent, because of their race and color, from making or carrying out contracts and agreements to labor.

Author: Rufus Wheeler Peckham

The general right to make a contract in relation to one's business is part of the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, and this includes the right to purchase and sell labor, except as controlled by the state in the legitimate exercise of its police power.

• Due Process
• Free Speech
• Health Care
• LGBTQ+ Rights
• Civil Rights and Discrimination
• Employment Law
• Health Care Law
• Bankruptcy Lawyers
• Business Lawyers
• Criminal Lawyers
• Employment Lawyers
• Estate Planning Lawyers
• Family Lawyers
• Personal Injury Lawyers
• Estate Planning
• Personal Injury
• Business Formation
• Business Operations
• Intellectual Property
• International Trade
• Real Estate
• Financial Aid
• Course Outlines
• Law Journals
• US Constitution
• Regulations
• Supreme Court
• Circuit Courts
• District Courts
• Dockets & Filings
• State Constitutions
• State Codes
• State Case Law
• Legal Blogs
• Business Forms
• Product Recalls
• Justia Connect Membership
• Justia Premium Placements
• Justia Elevate (SEO, Websites)
• Justia Amplify (PPC, GBP)
• Testimonials

Labor Forecasting

Task Management

Communications

Performance Management

Employee Engagement

Time & Attendance

Wage & Hour Automation

Restaurants

Hotels & Resorts

Bars & Breweries

Quick Service Restaurants

Stadiums & Events

Apparel & Fashion

Food Retail

Specialty Retail

Physicians & Clinics

CEO & Owner

Chief Financial Officer

General Manager

Human Resources

HR Department of 1

Payroll Manager

Implementation & Launch

Partners & Integrations

The top 7 recent employment law cases you should know

By David I. Brody

Jul. 31, 2020

When March began this year, nobody had any idea what was just around the corner – a global pandemic, a fiscal meltdown, unprecedented unemployment and a national reckoning with the terrible consequences of centuries of racial violence and inequity. Then we all witnessed a historic decision from the Supreme Court, affirming, at long last, that our family and friends in the LBGTQ community are protected from discrimination in employment under federal law. 

In this ever-changing landscape, it is increasingly important to keep up to speed on the latest employment legal cases and developments. Below is a brief summary of the seven most significant employment legal cases.

1. U.S. Supreme Court Issues Landmark Civil Rights Decision

Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. (2020)

The Supreme Court has issued a landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County , holding that Title VII prohibits discrimination against employees based upon sexual orientation and transgender status. 

In the 6-3 Opinion of the Court, written by Justice Gorsuch — who, along with Chief Justice Roberts, sided with the four “liberal” members of the Court — the majority held that a “straightforward” rule emerges from the ordinary meaning and application of Title VII’s prohibition against sex discrimination: 

“[F]or an employer to discriminate against employees for being homosexual or transgender, the employer must intentionally discriminate against individual men and women in part because of sex . That has always been prohibited by Title VII’s plain terms — and that should be the end of the analysis.’” 

Such discrimination has long been a violation of Massachusetts law, Chapter 151B, but with the Bostock decision, it is now clearly unlawful to discriminate in employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

2. Unlawful Employment Practices During the COVID-19 Pandemic

During these uncertain times, employers and employees alike are struggling to understand their legal rights and obligations. To that end, there has been a great deal of COVID-specific guidance provided by state and federal agencies, including the U.S. Equal Employment Commission , Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination , and Office of the Attorney General .

It is important to remember that neither a global pandemic nor an economic recession can be used as a shield by employers to carry out unlawful employment practices. 

Indeed, as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has noted, just because an employer may be required to “reduce its workforce does not mean that it is free to make its employment decisions on impermissible grounds: ‘even during a legitimate reorganization or workforce reduction, an employer may not dismiss employees for unlawful discriminatory reasons.’” See Sullivan v. Liberty Mut. Ins. Co. , 444 Mass. 34, 41–42 (2005).

If you think that you may have been illegally targeted, seek legal counsel as soon as possible and prior to waiving any legal rights.

Hlatky v. Steward Health Care System, Inc., 484 Mass. 566 (2020)

Following a jury trial, Dr. Hlatky, an experienced cancer researcher, was awarded $10 million in damages in a breach of contract action against her former employer, Steward Health. The $10 million damage award represented the cost of reestablishing her research laboratory, which she lost as a result of Defendant’s unlawful conduct. 

On appeal, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court unanimously agreed the damages awarded were not too speculative, noting that the harm suffered by Dr. Hlatky, including the loss of her research laboratory, equipment, and cell samples, constituted her “life’s work.”

The Court was, however, divided regarding whether restrictions should be imposed on how Dr. Hlatky could use the $10 million award. In the six Justice decision, three Justices were concerned that, since the laboratory had not actually belonged to Dr. Hlatky, an unrestricted award might put Dr. Hlatky in a better position than she would have been had there been no breach, e.g., “[n]othing would prevent Hlatky from spending the $10 million on a house or a yacht rather than on the re-establishment of a cancer research laboratory.”

The other three Justice were not persuaded, “Whether she wishes to start again, whether she even could start again after so much time has passed and her faculty position has been lost, whether she wishes to use the money to fund different research or others; research in the same field, or whether she wants to hike the Appalachian trail — these matters simply are not our concern.”

These Justices pointed out that imposing restrictions on such a damage award would open a “Pandora’s box of unknown future harm to the predictability of contract law upon which contracting parties have relied for hundreds of years.”

As the Court was equally divided, the trial court’s award of monetary damages – without restrictions – was affirmed.

4. Non-Competition Agreements and the “Material Change” Doctrine

Now Bus. Intel., Inc. v. Donahue, C.A. No. 17-3732 (Middlesex Sup Ct. Apr. 1, 2020)

A non-competition agreement may become unenforceable if, after execution, the terms and conditions of employment are modified to the point where the parties have effectively abandoned the original employment agreement and entered into a new employment agreement. This is known as the “material change” doctrine which was delineated in F.A. Bartlett Tree Expert Co. v. Barrington, 353 Mass. 585 (1968). The application of the material change doctrine is a highly fact-specific inquiry and will focus on factors, such as promotions, changes in job duties and titles, changes in remuneration, changes to sales area, as well as the associated time periods for such changes.

In the recent case of Now Bus. Intel. Inc. V. Donahue , the Superior Court rejected an employee’s material change defense to the enforceability of his non-compete. In granting Summary Judgment in favor of the former employer, the Court ultimately held that the temporary and short-term changes to the employee’s job duties, without more, did not amount to a material change sufficient to render otherwise reasonable and valid post-employment restriction unenforceable.

5. Anti-SLAPP Motion Revived

Rosario v. Caring Bees Healthcare, Inc., C.A. No. 19-P-1223 (Mass. App. Ct. June 5, 2020)

Retaliatory lawsuits designed to silence one from speaking out are referred to as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or “SLAPP Suits,” and are expressly forbidden in Massachusetts. See the Anti-SLAPP Statute, M.G.L. c. 231, § 59H (the “Statute”). The Statute provides a quick mechanism to dispose of SLAPP suits, and it allows the victim of a SLAPP suit to recover attorney’s fees.

Here, Ms. Rosario had complained (to co-workers, her mother, the MCAD, and, finally, in court) of sexual harassment by her supervisor, Jean Paul Karangwa. In response, Mr. Karangwa counter-sued Ms. Rosario for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Relying on the Statute, Ms. Rosario moved to dismiss Mr. Karangwa’s counter-claims. The lower court denied her motion, indicating that there was a colorable basis to believe that Ms. Rosario’s statements were defamatory, i.e ., false and causing damage to Mr. Karangwa.

However, the Massachusetts Appeals Court reversed and remanded. The Court reiterated that the legal issue was not solely whether Mr. Karangwa’s claims were “colorable” but also, if so, whether or not they were retaliatory, i.e. , “primarily brought to chill [Ms. Rosario’s] legitimate petitioning activities.” 

In considering whether or not Mr. Karangwa’s counterclaims were retaliatory, the lower court should consider, among other things, (1) whether the claims are ‘typical’ SLAPP claims, e.g., claims that one would not likely bring on their own, (2) the temporal proximity of when the counter-claims were brought to when Ms. Rosario engaged in escalated protected activity, e.g., when Ms. Rosario filed her claims to court, and (3) the chilling impact on such activity by, for example, increasing the cost to Ms. Rosario of complaining about sexual harassment.

The case was remanded to the lower court for a sequential application of the correct anti-SLAPP standard.

6. Enforcement of Arbitration Agreements

Theodore v. Uber Technologies, Inc., C.A. No. 18-cv-12147 (D. Mass. Mar. 3, 2020)

Many executives (and employees generally) are subject to arbitration clauses of which they are unaware until a dispute arises. The enforceability of such clauses is often hotly disputed. This is particularly true in civil rights cases, pitting two established principles against each other ( i.e. , the preference for arbitration under federal law against a strong public policy against discrimination). Enforceability is often fact-specific, such as whether the agreement to arbitrate and the waiver of judicial remedy are sufficiently obvious and clear.

Although Theodore is not an employment case, its analysis may be useful, especially regarding on-line forms that invite a user to follow one or more links which can be easily bypassed. The US District Court’s analysis involved not only a review of the text itself but also a discussion of the font size, layout, and background color on the page. The Court went so far as to include screen-shots in the decision.

Ultimately, the Court refused to compel arbitration where Uber invited a customer to click to “CREATE ACCOUNT” without “reasonably communicating” the impact of doing so.

7. The Process – and Not Just the Final Decision – Matters

Comcast Corp. v. Nat’l Assoc. of African American-Owned Media, 140 S.Ct. 1009 (2020)

In Comcast , the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously held that the but-for causation standard applies to claims of racial discrimination raised under 42 U.S.C. § 1981, a statute which guarantees all persons the same right “to make and enforce contracts . . . as is enjoyed by white citizens.” However, the Court expressly declined to decide an issue raised by Comcast, i.e , whether § 1981(a) guarantees only the right to equivalent contractual outcomes, as Comcast argued, or if it also guarantees the right to an equivalent contracting process, as the law has been interpreted for years.

In her concurrence, Justice Ginsburg addressed Comcast’s argument directly:

“I write separately to resist Comcast’s attempt to cabin a ‘sweeping’ law designed to ‘break down all discrimination between black men and white men” … Under Comcast’s view, § 1981 countenances racial discrimination so long as it occurs in advance of the final contract-formation decision. Thus, a lender would not violate § 1981by requiring prospective borrowers to provide one reference letter if they are white and five if they black. Nor would an employer violate § 1981 by reimbursing expenses for white interviewees but requiring black applicants to pay their own way … That view cannot be squared with the statute. An equal ‘right … to make… contracts’ … is an empty promise without equal opportunities to present or receive offers and negotiate over terms … It is implausible that a law ‘intended to secure … practical freedom’ … would condone discriminatory barriers to contract formation.”

As Justice Ginsburg recognized, and recent events have made abundantly clear, we must remain vigilant to protect and expand, not erode, our civil rights laws.

Schedule, engage, and pay your staff in one system with Workforce.com.

HR, Scheduling, and Payroll for your business.

Book a demo

Book a Demo

What product(s) are you interested in? *

Join over 52,000 of your HR peers

Don't miss out on the latest tactics and insights at the forefront of HR.

Starbucks discrimination lawsuit awarded white employee $25 million: Legal experts weigh in

Shannon Phillips received $25.6 million in damages after a six-day trial.

A federal jury this week found that Starbucks discriminated against a white manager who was fired amid an uproar over the company's treatment of Black customers at a store in Philadelphia five years ago.

The ex-manager, Shannon Phillips, received $25.6 million in damages after a six-day trial, Phillips' attorneys previously told ABC News.

The resolution of a lawsuit against one of the nation's largest employers drew attention to the standard for proving discrimination as well as the federal protection against bias afforded to all racial groups, regardless of whether they've faced historical marginalization, experts told ABC News.

The jury appears to have been persuaded in part by the argument that Phillips was fired as part of a public relations effort undertaken by Starbucks in response to racial justice backlash, which may carry implications for how corporations act in such circumstances, experts added.

Starbucks did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment. In court documents , the company rejected allegations of discrimination, saying that it disciplined Phillips for "legitimate, nondiscriminatory, non-retaliatory reasons."

MORE: Starbucks ordered to pay over $25 million to white former manager who claimed racial discrimination

Here's what to know about the Starbucks discrimination case and its implications, according to legal experts:

Why did the jury find that race played a role in the firing of the Starbucks employee?

In 2018, two Black men -- Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson -- were arrested at a Philadelphia-area Starbucks store after an employee called 911 and accused them of trespassing because they had not made a purchase.

The two men later reached a private settlement with Starbucks and the City of Philadelphia, which agreed to pay each of the men $1 and establish a $200,000 fund for young entrepreneurs.

Phillips, a then-regional director who had worked at the company for nearly 13 years, was terminated less than a month after the incident.

In an initial lawsuit filed by Phillips in 2019, she said she was not at the store that day nor involved in the lead-up to the arrests, alleging instead that her race played a "determinative role" in her termination.

A key piece of evidence in the case centered on testimony from a Black district manager who said he thought race had played a role in Starbucks' decision to fire Phillips and allow him to remain with the company, Phillips' attorney previously told ABC News.

MORE: Target faces criticism from artists involved with Pride month products over response to boycott: ‘Quick to fold’

Legal experts concurred with that assessment, saying that the plaintiff's ability to point to disparate treatment of a relevant employee was critical to the jury's finding of discrimination.

"My understanding is that in these cases what you have to have is a comparative," Rick Rossein, a professor of employee discrimination law at the City University of New York Law School, told ABC News. "Here you have a Starbucks manager giving that type of testimony."

In court documents, Starbucks contested this account of its actions, saying instead that it disciplined Phillips based on poor performance. Phillips "appeared overwhelmed, frozen and lacked awareness of how critical the situation was for Starbucks and its partners," the company claimed .

Phillips appeared to further persuade the jury with her explanation for the alleged mistreatment, describing her firing as part of the company's effort to minimize the public relations fallout from the arrests, the experts added.

"Evidence points to Starbucks taking action against an employee in order to address public opinion as opposed to really addressing the question of who was involved in making that decision," Risa Lieberwitz, a professor of labor and employment law at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, told ABC News.

Is it unusual for workplace discrimination cases to be brought on behalf of white people?

Phillips’ case is unusual because the majority of cases alleging a violation of federal discrimination law on the basis of race involve non-white people, legal experts told ABC News.

Legal precedent that reaches as high as the Supreme Court affirms that the measure at issue, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, protects white workers who experience discrimination, they added.

"Anti-discrimination law that deals with race discrimination applies to any allegation of race discrimination whether it would be against a white employee, a Black employee or another racial group," Lieberwitz said.

While discrimination lawsuits on behalf of white individuals are uncommon, white plaintiffs have proven more likely to succeed than non-white ones when federal judges adjudicate their racial discrimination claims, said Wendy Greene, a professor of anti-discrimination law at Drexel University Law School and the director of the Center for Law, Policy and Social Action.

MORE: 'Thrown in their faces': Bud Light salespeople say boycott is hurting commission

"The surprise for many people, however, is that federal civil rights laws initially designed to address the longstanding, systemic racial segregation, exclusion and discrimination endured by individuals identifying as non-white are seemingly more effective at redressing racial discrimination against individuals who identify as white," Greene told ABC News.

What are the implications of the finding that Starbucks discriminated in this case?

The decision in this case could heighten scrutiny of large companies in their treatment of workers who belong to groups protected against discrimination as well as complicate efforts to discipline workers charged with improving a company's performance on racial justice issues, experts said.

"We're in the era where people are looking very carefully at decision-making by major corporations," Rosstein said.

Greene, meanwhile, said that the decision could make it more difficult for companies to supervise workers involved in the implementation of racial justice initiatives, since companies could be accused of racial discrimination if they discipline such employees.

MORE: With anti-drag laws on the rise, drag queens reclaim the art as form of protest

Management must balance the need to create a work environment free of racial discrimination with a simultaneous commitment to "ensure workplaces are free of racial exclusion and subordination, which are often couched as acts of racial discrimination against white employees in favor of non-white people," Greene said.

The large award for damages in the Starbucks case could "discourage employers from disciplining or terminating employees they believe are not effectively handling complaints of discrimination," she added.

Related Topics

Popular reads.

Trump is 'safe' after agents fire at gunman

• Sep 15, 11:12 PM

Sean 'Diddy' Combs charged, held without bail

• Sep 17, 4:38 PM

Harris seen as debate winner: POLL

• Sep 15, 7:01 AM

Gunman didn't have Trump in sight or take a shot

• Sep 16, 7:13 PM

4 dead in shooting at Georgia high school

• Sep 4, 10:47 PM

ABC News Live

24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

Workplace discrimination

• Business and society
• Diversity and inclusion
• Age and generational issues
• Disabilities

5 Ways Managers Can Support Pregnant Employees

• Kaylee J Hackney
• Shanna R Daniels
• Samantha Paustian Underdahl
• Kristen P Jones
• Jacquelyn M Brady
• January 12, 2022

When (and How) to Speak Up as an Ally

• Kenji Yoshino
• David Glasgow
• February 06, 2023

Research: Why Managers Deny Inequity in Their Own Organizations

• Christopher To
• Elad N. Sherf
• Maryam Kouchaki
• July 17, 2023

DEI Is Under Attack. Here's How Companies Can Mitigate the Legal Risks.

• January 05, 2024

Modest Manifesto for Shattering the Glass Ceiling

• Debra Meyerson
• Joyce K. Fletcher
• From the January–February 2000 Issue

Should You Disclose an Invisible Marginalized Identity at Work?

• Dannie Lynn
• January 26, 2023

How to Effectively — and Legally — Use Racial Data for DEI

• July 24, 2023

Why More American Men Feel Discriminated Against

• Dan Cassino
• September 29, 2016

Expectant Executive and the Endangered Promotion

• Cindee Mock
• Andrea Bruno
• From the January–February 1994 Issue

Co-Opt the Old Boys' Club: Make It Work for Women

• Ilene H. Lang
• From the November 2011 Issue

Life's Work: An Interview with Janelle Monae

• Janelle Monae
• Curt Nickisch
• From the September–October 2020 Issue

What It’s Like to Be a Woman of Color in Architecture

• Joan C. Williams
• Rachel M. Korn
• February 04, 2022

How to Confront Racism at Work: Our Favorite Reads

• Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar
• March 07, 2022

Retention Through Redemption (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition)

• D. Michael Abrashoff
• September 01, 2001

Dysfunction in the Boardroom

• Boris Groysberg
• Deborah Bell
• From the June 2013 Issue

3 Workplace Biases that Derail Mid-Career Women

• Colleen Ammerman
• September 16, 2022

What SCOTUS’s Affirmative Action Decision Means for Corporate DEI

• July 12, 2023

A Better Way to Fight Discrimination in the Sharing Economy

• Dennis Zhang
• Ruomeng Cui
• February 27, 2017

Research: Companies Are Less Likely to Hire Current Military Reservists

• Theodore F Figinski
• October 13, 2017

Work, Parenting, and the Pandemic

• Daisy Dowling
• Laura Amico
• Haley Swenson
• David G Smith
• W Brad Johnson
• Caitlyn Collins
• Ellen Ernst Kossek
• Kelly Schwind Wilson
• Lindsay Mechem Rosokha
• Jennifer Traig
• Jacqueline Zeller
• November 11, 2020

Differences at Work: Alex (B)

• Sandra J. Sucher
• Rachel Gordon
• November 21, 2007

Differences at Work: Ben (B)

Sonia millar: negotiating for the c-suite.

• Joshua D. Margolis
• Anne Donnellon
• September 10, 2019

Executive Women at Link.Com

• Joanne Martin
• September 01, 1997

The Flawed Emergency Response to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (B)

• Richard Falkenrath
• Susan Rosegrant
• September 01, 2000

Julia Stasch (A)

• Kirk O. Hanson
• Jonathan Eisenberg
• January 01, 1993

Star Distributors, Inc. (A)

• David A. Thomas
• Deborah J. Evans
• August 31, 1992

Differences at Work: Allie (B)

Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good

• November 16, 2021

Augusta National Golf Club Controversy (C)

• Herman B. Leonard
• Marc J. Epstein
• Melissa Tritter
• October 05, 2005

HBR's Women at Work Collection (2 Books)

• Harvard Business Review
• Herminia Ibarra
• Deborah Tannen
• Sylvia Ann Hewlett
• April 16, 2019

Differences at Work: Ben (C)

• November 26, 2007

HBR Women at Work Boxed Set (6 Books)

• April 25, 2023

The Flawed Emergency Response to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (C)

• August 01, 2000

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Diversity (with bonus article "Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity" By David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely)

• Robin J. Ely
• May 21, 2019

Daka International, Inc. (A)

• Robert J. Robinson
• September 24, 1993

HBR Guide for Women at Work

• November 13, 2018

Crossing the Line: Don Imus and the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team

• Esther Scott
• February 04, 2011

Julia Stasch (B)

White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

• May 16, 2017

Popular Topics

Partner center.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Who Discriminates in Hiring? A New Study Can Tell.

Applications seemingly from Black candidates got fewer replies than those evidently from white candidates. The method could point to specific companies.

By Eduardo Porter

Twenty years ago, Kalisha White performed an experiment. A Marquette University graduate who is Black, she suspected that her application for a job as executive team leader at a Target in Wisconsin was being ignored because of her race. So she sent in another one, with a name (Sarah Brucker) more likely to make the candidate appear white.

Though the fake résumé was not quite as accomplished as Ms. White’s, the alter ego scored an interview. Target ultimately paid over half a million dollars to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Ms. White and a handful of other Black job applicants.

Now a variation on her strategy could help expose racial discrimination in employment across the corporate landscape.

Economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago this week unveiled a vast discrimination audit of some of the largest U.S. companies. Starting in late 2019, they sent 83,000 fake job applications for entry-level positions at 108 companies — most of them in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 list, and some of their subsidiaries.

Their insights can provide valuable evidence about violations of Black workers’ civil rights.

The researchers — Patrick Kline and Christopher Walters of Berkeley and Evan K. Rose of Chicago — are not ready to reveal the names of companies on their list. But they plan to, once they expose the data to more statistical tests. Labor lawyers, the E.E.O.C. and maybe the companies themselves could do a lot with this information. (Dr. Kline said they had briefed the U.S. Labor Department on the general findings.)

In the study, applicants’ characteristics — like age, sexual orientation, or work and school experience — varied at random. Names, however, were chosen purposefully to ensure applications came in pairs: one with a more distinctive white name — Jake or Molly, say — and the other with a similar background but a more distinctive Black name, like DeShawn or Imani.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

More From Forbes

Walmart is sued for gender and race discrimination by eeoc.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

AMERICAN CANYON, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 16: A sign is posted in front of a Walmart store on November ... [+] 16, 2021 in American Canyon, California. Walmart reported better-than-expected third quarter earnings with revenues of $140.53 billion, or $1.45 per share, compared to the analyst expectations of $135.60 billion, or $1.40 per share. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Days after former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores sued the NFL and others for discrimination, another discrimination lawsuit is in the news . But this time the alleged discrimination took place in the retail industry.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit it announced today that a Walmart store in Iowa violated federal law when it gave a Black female employee an unsanitary lactation space based upon her race and failed to promote her based on sex stereotypes about mothers with small children.

The EEOC said it is seeking back pay, compensatory damages and punitive damages for the former employee, as well as injunctive relief to prevent future discrimination.

Statement From Walmart

A Walmart spokesperson said that, “We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind, and diversity and inclusion is a key company priority.

“We take allegations like this seriously and tried for the past two years to resolve this matter with the EEOC to avoid litigation. We will address the claims in Court after we are served.”

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of 2024

Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024, cases on the rise.

According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission , there were more than 21,000 filed charges of sex discrimination in fiscal year 2020, up by more than 31% from 2019. Race discrimination lawsuits increased by almost 32% over the same period. Several of those lawsuits created negative publicity for companies and organizations and hurt their image and reputation.

Nicole Porter is a law professor The University of Toledo and teaches classes on employment law. She said that, "Despite two decades-old laws prohibiting sex discrimination sex discrimination remains prevalent in many— perhaps most—workplaces.

“But the prevalence of such discrimination varies widely from one workplace to another. Workplaces where sex discrimination runs rampant are generally in male-dominated industries that are often infused with a macho, uber-competitive culture and authoritative management styles,” she observed.

“Workplaces that are very hierarchical with extremely rigid rules tend to be less hospitable to women (and other subordinated groups, such as people with disabilities, people of color, and LGBT+ employees),” Porter noted.

EEOC’s Walmart Investigation

According to a press release from the EEOC, the agency’s pre-suit investigation revealed that “Walmart failed to promote the employee to a management position at its Ottumwa store because it assumed she would not remain with the company long due to her having a newborn at home. Walmart also gave her an unsanitary storage closet to express her breast milk, a facility that was inferior to the clean office space it provided to a White employee for the same purpose.”

The EEOC said it filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process.

“It is inexcusable and unlawful that qualified women are still facing these kinds of discrimin­atory barriers to career advancement in the workplace,” said Gregory Gochanour, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Chicago District Office. “Federal law clearly prohibits employers from making discrim­inatory promotion decisions based on sex stereotypes and requires employers to provide equal working conditions for their employees regardless of race.” 

Advice For Business Leaders

Porter at The University of Toledo said, “Employers hoping to avoid the negative effects of discrimination, which includes possible legal liability as well as damage to their reputation, should scrutinize their entire management structure and culture.

“Women should have a seat at the table at all levels of management. Rigid workplace rules and norms should be scrutinized to determine if they can be justified (and “this is the way it has always been” is not a justification). The better workplace cultures will have management that empowers all employees to work together to excel at their jobs, while giving them as much autonomy as possible.”

‘Discrimination Is Preventable’

Attorney Nirupa Netram has more than two decades of experience in the legal, corporate, and government sectors in the areas of law, compliance, human resources, and operations. She said that, “The good news is discrimination is preventable. Businesses should send a clear message that their organization does not tolerate discrimination or any other form of illegal and/or unethical conduct.

Policies And Reporting Procedures

“Leaders must ensure their company has anti-discrimination policies, which comply with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Such policies are typically written by an attorney with experience in labor law and that attorney should review such policies annually and revise them, if necessary,” she noted.

Netram said,“Additionally, as part of those policies, the organization should have a written mechanism for employees to internally report instances of suspected discrimination. The organization should regularly (at least annually) communicate its policies and reporting methods to its employees.

Mandatory Training

“There should also be mandatory training for every employee annually on how to recognize, prevent, and report workplace discrimination. If an employee reports an instance of discrimination, the company should promptly and thoroughly investigate the claim neutrally, which, depending on the circumstances, may involve using an outside, third-party entity to conduct the investigation,” she advised.

Take Appropriate Actions

“And, if an investigation reveals the complaint has merit, the business must take appropriate action, including separating the offender, if warranted, without delay. This sends a clear signal of the company’s strong commitment to an ethical and inclusive workplace, which is vital to the success and longevity of the business, including its employees,” Netram concluded.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Race, ethnicity, and discrimination at work: a new analysis of legal protections and gaps in all 193 UN countries

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

ISSN : 2040-7149

Article publication date: 1 February 2023

Issue publication date: 18 December 2023

While only one aspect of fulfilling equal rights, effectively addressing workplace discrimination is integral to creating economies, and countries, that allow for everyone's full and equal participation.

Design/methodology/approach

Labor, anti-discrimination, and other relevant pieces of legislation were identified through the International Labor Organization's NATLEX database, supplemented with legislation identified through country websites. For each country, two researchers independently coded legislation and answered questions about key policy features. Systematic quality checks and outlier verifications were conducted.

More than 1 in 5 countries do not explicitly prohibit racial discrimination in employment. 54 countries fail to prohibit unequal pay based on race. 107 countries prohibit racial and/or ethnic discrimination but do not explicitly require employers to take preventive measures against discrimination. The gaps are even larger with respect to multiple and intersectional discrimination. 112 countries fail to prohibit discrimination based on both migration status and race and/or ethnicity; 103 fail to do so for foreign national origin and race and/or ethnicity.

Practical implications

Both recent and decades-old international treaties and agreements require every country globally to uphold equal rights regardless of race. However, specific national legislation that operationalizes these commitments and prohibits discrimination in the workplace is essential to their impact. This research highlights progress and gaps that must be addressed.

Originality/value

This is the first study to measure legal protections against employment discrimination based on race and ethnicity in all 193 UN countries. This study also examines protection in all countries from discrimination on the basis of characteristics that have been used in a number of settings as a proxy for racial/ethnic discrimination and exclusion, including SES, migration status, and religion.

• Discrimination
• Migration status

Heymann, J. , Varvaro-Toney, S. , Raub, A. , Kabir, F. and Sprague, A. (2023), "Race, ethnicity, and discrimination at work: a new analysis of legal protections and gaps in all 193 UN countries", Equality, Diversity and Inclusion , Vol. 42 No. 9, pp. 16-34. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-01-2022-0027

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023, Jody Heymann, Sheleana Varvaro-Toney, Amy Raub, Firooz Kabir and Aleta Sprague

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Introduction

Work plays a fundamental role in shaping the conditions of people's lives. Earnings from employment are the predominant source of income for most people; income in turn shapes access to a wide range of necessities including housing, transportation, and food, as well as non-essentials that impact quality of life and access to opportunities. In many countries where health insurance is partial or incomplete, work shapes access to healthcare. And by affecting where families live and whether caregivers can take time off to meet the developmental needs of children, the availability and conditions of work can have profound impacts on child development and education. Likewise, as adults age, as well as at the end of life, work histories can and do shape retirement income in most countries, and working conditions influence the ability of adults to care for aging family members.

As a result, when discrimination impedes work opportunities or results in loss of income, the consequences affect not only the quality and equality of work lives, but also of many other spheres of life. Moreover, when certain groups of workers routinely face bias in the workplace, this discrimination widens other inequalities in the economy, with ripple effects that have impacts on health, housing, children's access to quality education, and equal rights more broadly.

Given these vast and intergenerational impacts, the extent and persistence of workplace discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity worldwide—which occurs at each stage of employment, including hiring, promotions, demotions, pay, working conditions, and terminations—represents a significant threat to both individual households and societies as a whole, as well as a clear violation of fundamental human rights. Moreover, studies in countries around the world have documented how employment discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity commonly intersects with discrimination based on migration status, socioeconomic status, gender, and other characteristics, compounding other forms of inequality. While only one aspect of fulfilling equal rights, effectively addressing workplace discrimination is integral to creating economies, and countries, that allow for everyone's full and equal participation.

In this article, we review the research evidence on employment discrimination based on race and on the impact of anti-discrimination legislation, and then present the methods and results of the first study of anti-discrimination protections in all 193 UN countries.

Discrimination in hiring

A wide range of studies have demonstrated racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring, including studies in which researchers submit fictitious CVs and applications that reflect similar credentials and experience, but that vary with respect to photos, names, and/or experiences suggestive of different racial or ethnic identities. These “correspondence studies,” which improved on prior methods of testing for racial discrimination by making candidates substantively identical except for markers of race/ethnicity ( Bertrand and Duflo, 2017 ), find that presumed race/ethnicity influences the likelihood that a particular candidate receives an invitation to interview, with those representing historically marginalized racial or ethnic groups consistently receiving fewer callbacks ( Baert, 2018 ).

Other research approaches include direct interviews with hiring managers and simulations in which study participants rate the strength of hypothetical job candidates based on their photos and descriptions of their experience and characteristics where, again, the principal aspect varied is race/ethnicity, either on its own or together with intersectional characteristics like migration status or gender.

These research approaches also document the persistence of discrimination in hiring across jobs and geographies. For example, research in Nigeria found that managers of both public and private organizations were more likely to hire applicants from their own ethnic group ( Adisa et al. , 2017 ). A study spanning five European countries—Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom—demonstrated discrimination in the hiring of Black and Middle Eastern men ( Di Stasio and Larsen, 2020 ).

Discrimination based on common proxies for race or ethnicity can likewise shape job prospects. In Canada, for example, migrants from sub-Saharan Africa report that their accents can be a barrier to becoming employed and having career mobility ( Creese, 2010 ), while in the US, numerous court cases have illustrated how Black women commonly face barriers to employment because their natural hairstyles are found to violate “neutral” grooming codes ( Greene, 2017 ).

Discrimination is also often intersectional. In Germany, a 2020 study found that women with Turkish names were less likely than those with German names to receive interview invitations, and this gap widened further for women wearing headscarves ( Weichselbaumer, 2020 ). Similarly, in a Mexico study, both marital status and skin color affected women's chance of receiving an interview ( Arceo-Gomez and Campos-Vasquez, 2014 ). In Belgium, women from minority ethnic groups were less likely to be considered for a “high-cognitive demanding job” than either native women or minority ethnic men ( Derous and Pepermans, 2019 ).

Discrimination in promotions

Studies have also documented racial and ethnic discrimination in promotions across professions, from police forces to law firms to universities ( Tomlinson, 2019 ; Zempi, 2020 ). From Finland to South Africa to the United Kingdom and the United States, workers from marginalized racial and ethnic groups report discrimination in promotion, consistent with the research evidence based on multilevel multivariate studies of discrimination, as well as based on implicit bias testing of supervisors ( Hatch et al. , 2016 ; Mayiya et al. , 2019 ; Stalker, 1994 ; Yu, 2020 ; Zempi, 2020 ). In Canada, research has documented that visible minorities have less upward mobility even after controlling for education, work experience, time with the employer, and other factors ( Javdani, 2020 ), including both supply- and demand-side factors ( Javdani and McGee, 2018 ; Yap, 2010 ; Yap and Konrad, 2009 ).

Aside from direct discrimination in promotions, employer practices that evaluate employee conduct differently or otherwise deny opportunities for professional advancement based on race or ethnicity can affect opportunities within the workplace. For example, a study that experimentally changed the race/ethnicity of an employee in a photo while asking study participants to evaluate their performance demonstrated that simple acts such as being late for work led to a significantly greater negative impact on the appraisal of hypothetical employees when the photo showed a Black or Latinx employee than when the photo showed a white employee ( Luksyte et al. , 2013 ). Visible minorities are also less likely to receive training opportunities that can influence upward mobility in the labor force ( Dostie and Javdani, 2020 ).

Discrimination in terminations

Both direct discrimination by employers and structural discrimination that cuts across economies can make workers from marginalized racial and ethnic groups more vulnerable to terminations. For example, studies have found that during economic downturns, immigrants and workers from historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups face heightened risks of labor market discrimination and job loss ( Couch and Fairlie, 2010 ; Lessem and Nakajima, 2019 ). Moreover, the consequences of past discrimination and exclusion from economic opportunities mean that workers from underrepresented groups are less likely to have seniority within a given organization or company. As a result, in addition to direct racial/ethnic discrimination that may lead to higher rates of termination, “last hired, first fired” policies can result in indirect discrimination against workers from historically excluded groups.

Impacts of discrimination in hiring, job positions, and promotions on pay inequality

Discrimination in hiring can impact initial salaries and level and type of starting position. When individuals are hired into jobs below their skill level because of bias based on race and ethnicity, they earn less than they would have earned had there been no discrimination ( Coleman, 2003 ). Likewise, when discrimination results in the overrepresentation of workers from historically marginalized racial/ethnic groups in limited employment capacities, including temporary or seasonal jobs, gaps in both pay and benefits further widen. Survey research across 30 European countries showed that even after controlling for education, experience, occupation, and other categories, racial and ethnic minorities were more likely to end up in jobs where their skills were underutilized, leading to lower wages than if they were in a position more matched to their skills and offering reduced pathways for advancement ( Rafferty, 2020 ). In Chile, qualitative research has found that Peruvian migrants simultaneously experience limited employment trajectory due to their external migrant status alongside racialization by local Chileans who perceive them to be more fit for low-status and low-income positions due to assumptions about their physical and cultural traits ( Mora and Undurraga, 2013 ).

Direct pay discrimination

Even for the same job position, the “unexplained” wage differential after taking experience into account gives an indication of the amount of the wage differential that could be due to discrimination and bias. One-half to two-thirds of wage differences across racial and ethnic groups in some studies have been estimated to be due to bias ( Drydakis, 2012 ; Piazzalunga, 2015 ). While the data clearly demonstrates the existence of bias and discrimination in pay against specific groups in a range of countries, there has not been a comprehensive look across countries and racial/ethnic groups to document in detail when and where the wage gaps are greatest and lowest, before and after taking into account the impact of bias throughout the work lifecourse.

The documented and potential impacts of national laws addressing discrimination

Individual countries that have passed antidiscrimination laws have seen improvements including greater equality in hiring and lowering of wage disparities ( Leck et al. , 1995 ). While antidiscrimination laws alone do not eliminate discrimination in hiring, pay, promotions, or terminations, studies both across countries and across populations have demonstrated that antidiscrimination laws can make a difference. In Canada, for example, studies of the Employment Equity Act found that the share of visible minorities who were employed in the private sector increased to much closer to the percentage of the population following the law's adoption ( Agocs, 2002 ; Leck and Saunders, 1992 ). In the United States, studies have found that antidiscrimination laws contributed to wage and income increases for Black workers ( Collins, 2003 ; Donohue and Heckman, 1991 ) and a narrowing of the racial/ethnic pay gap ( Chay, 1998 ).

These findings on laws' impacts on employment outcomes by race parallel those observed for other groups of marginalized workers. For example, one study of 141 countries found that laws prohibiting gender discrimination in employment increased women's labor force participation in formal jobs ( del Mar Alonso-Almeida, 2014 ), while in the UK, legislation guaranteeing equal pay and non-discrimination in employment on the basis of sex resulted in a 19.4% increase in women's earnings and a 17% increase in women's employment rates relative to men's ( Zabalza and Zafiris, 1985 ). Moreover, explicitly prohibiting all forms of workplace discrimination matters to norms. In addition to their practical or applied value, laws prohibiting discrimination have important expressive value that can shape workplace expectations as well as societal views of equality more broadly, with the potential to affect rates of both explicit and implicit bias ( Sunstein, 1996 ). At the same time, the past several decades of antidiscrimination law have revealed important gaps to address. First, as many of the studies cited in the previous section illustrated, racial and ethnic discrimination commonly co-occurs with discrimination based on migration status, foreign national origin, social class, and other characteristics, highlighting the cumulative and often intersectional impacts of key facets of identity on work-related experiences around the world. Clearly banning all common grounds of discrimination, including those used as proxies for race or ethnicity or that commonly intersect with race or ethnicity, is a critical first step.

Second, prohibitions of indirect discrimination can offer important protection against racial/ethnic discrimination, including in instances where discrimination based on an unprotected ground has disparate impacts on the basis of race or ethnicity. This is true both for common grounds of discrimination that would ideally be explicitly covered by domestic labor laws (as they are by international treaties, e.g. national origin) ( Demetriou, 2016 ), as well as proxies for racial/ethnic discrimination that are not generally addressed on their own (e.g. accents and hairstyles) ( Justesen, 2016 ). In contrast, when discrimination laws take an overly formal approach to discrimination that only covers acts that were direct or intentional, they fail to account for the extensive evidence demonstrating that policies and practices that are racially neutral on their face may have disproportionate consequences for workers from historically marginalized groups.

Third and finally, while protections against employment discrimination are essential, more attention must be paid to implementation. While a range of actions are needed, evidence shows that having legal protections in place against retaliation may increase reporting rates by reassuring workers that their careers will be protected if they report discrimination ( Bergman et al. , 2002 ; Gorod, 2007 ; Keenan, 1990 ; Pillay et al. , 2018 ).

This is the first study to examine legislation in all 193 UN countries to map the extent to which each country in the world has protections against racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring, promotions, training, demotions, and terminations, as well as whether they proactively support implementation through clear legislative prohibitions of retaliation for reporting. Further, we examine to what extent countries not only address direct discrimination based on race/ethnicity, but also indirect racial/ethnic discrimination and/or direct discrimination based on grounds that can serve as proxies depending on the historical and societal context for racial discrimination, including religion, migration status, and socioeconomic status. Further, we highlight examples where countries explicitly address intersectionality. Finally, we examine whether there were gains over the past five years in the number of countries that are prohibiting each type of discrimination.

Methodology

Data source.

We constructed a database of prohibitions against discrimination in private sector labor in all 193 UN member states as of January 2021. Labor, anti-discrimination, and other relevant pieces of legislation were identified through the International Labor Organization's NATLEX database, supplemented with legislation identified through country websites. A coding framework was developed to systematically capture key policy features. This coding framework was reviewed by researchers, lawyers, and other leaders working on employment discrimination and tested on a subset of countries before database coding commenced.

For each country and protected characteristic studied, two researchers independently read legislation in its original language or a translation and used the coding framework to assess whether legislation specifically prohibited discrimination in each aspect of work or broadly, whether there were any exceptions to prohibitions of discrimination based on employer characteristics, and whether there were specific provisions in place to support effective implementation. In countries where anti-discrimination protections are legislated subnationally, the lowest level of protection across states or provinces was captured. Answers were then reconciled to minimize human error. When the two researchers could not arrive at an agreement based on the codebook framework, the full coding team met to discuss, and the coding framework was updated to reflect the decision. When updates were made, countries that had already been coded were checked for consistency with the update.

Once coding was complete, systematic quality checks were conducted of variables that proved challenging for researchers during the coding process. Randomized quality checks were conducted of variables that were more straightforward, checking first twenty countries to ensure no errors were identified and a larger subset of countries if there were errors. Finally, outlier verifications globally and by region or country income level were conducted for all variables. In order to assess whether legislative provisions have strengthened over time, similar methods were used to construct measures of laws in place as of August 2016.

Strength of prohibitions of discrimination

We examined legislation across six areas: hiring, pay, training, promotions and/or demotions, termination, and harassment. For each area, we assessed the strength of protection against racial and ethnic discrimination. We classified countries as having a “specific prohibition of racial or ethnic discrimination” if legislation either: 1) explicitly addressed racial and ethnic discrimination in that aspect of work (“racial discrimination in hiring is prohibited”); or 2) broadly prohibited racial discrimination at work (“there shall be no discrimination at work based on race”) and guaranteed equality in the specific area (“no one shall be discriminated against in hiring decisions”). For equal pay, we further distinguished between countries that guaranteed equal pay for equal work and those that had a stronger provision guaranteeing equal pay for work of equal value which would prohibit differences in pay when there is occupational segregation.

Countries were classified as having a “broad prohibition of racial or ethnic discrimination” if legislation broadly prohibited discrimination based on race or ethnicity, but did not address specific aspects of work. Countries were coded as having a “general prohibition of discrimination” if legislation did not explicitly address race or ethnicity but banned discrimination in an aspect of work for all workers. “No explicit prohibition” denotes when legislation did not take any of the approaches above. We separately analyzed whether prohibitions of discrimination included indirect discrimination, which would protect against seemingly neutral practices or criteria that have disparate impacts across race and/or ethnicity.

Intersecting characteristics

In many countries racial and/or ethnic discrimination is deeply intertwined with other characteristics, including social class, migration status, foreign national origin, and religion. Accordingly, we assessed whether laws prohibit discrimination based on both race and/or ethnicity and these intersecting characteristics.

Employer responsibilities

We assessed whether legislation required employers to take measures to prevent racial or ethnic discrimination in the workplace. In doing so, we distinguished between legislation that made it a general responsibility and legislation that outlined specific steps for employers to take. These specific prevention steps included requirements to create a code of conduct to prevent racial discrimination, establish disciplinary procedures, raise awareness of anti-discrimination laws, or conduct trainings to prevent discrimination.

Prohibitions of retaliation

To capture the extent to which provisions effectively covered the range of forms that retaliation can take, we coded the protections for individuals who reported discrimination, filed a complaint, or initiated litigation (any adverse action, disciplinary action, or retaliatory dismissal only) and whether prohibitions of retaliation covered all workers participating in the investigation.

Firm-based exceptions

In some countries, prohibitions of discrimination are weakened by provisions that exempt certain employers. We captured exceptions that broadly applied to prohibitions of discrimination or specifically in different aspects of work based on firm type for small businesses, charities and non-profits, and religious organizations.

All analyses were conducted using Stata MP 14.2. Differences were assessed by region using the Pearson's chi-square statistics. Region was categorized according to the World Bank's country and lending groups as of 2020 [ 1 ].

Globally, 153 countries prohibited at least some form of racial and/or ethnic discrimination at work in 2021, a modest increase from 148 countries in 2016 ( Figure 1 ). Three of the countries introducing these new prohibitions were in Sub-Saharan Africa (Mali, South Sudan, and Zambia), one in Europe (Iceland), and one in the South Pacific (Tuvalu). An additional five countries expanded existing prohibitions of racial and/or ethnic discrimination either to broadly prohibit discrimination at work in addition to specific prohibitions in certain areas (Barbados and Honduras) or to comprehensively cover discrimination at work in all areas, as well as indirect racial and/or ethnic discrimination (Andorra, Burundi, and Sao Tome and Principe).

Gaps in prohibitions are found in every region of the world. Countries in the Americas were the most likely to prohibit at least some form of racial discrimination at work, followed closely by Europe and Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In each of these regions, only ten percent or fewer of countries lacked at least some form of prohibition. In contrast, a majority of countries lack prohibitions of racial discrimination in East Asia and Pacific and South Asia ( Figure 2 ). Differences were statistically significant between these two regions and the three regions with the highest levels of prohibitions ( p  < 0.01).

In 2016, 107 countries had a law that explicitly prohibited race-based discrimination in hiring. That number increased to 115 countries in 2021 (see Figure 2 ). An additional 27 countries in 2016 and 29 countries in 2021 had either a broad prohibition of race discrimination or a general prohibition of discrimination in hiring. Prohibitions of racial/ethnic discrimination in hiring were most common in Europe and Central Asia (91%) followed by sub-Saharan Africa (62%). In all other regions, fewer than half of countries prohibited racial discrimination in hiring ( Figure 3 ).

Training and promotions/demotions

Eighty countries in 2016 and 88 countries in 2021 prohibited discrimination based on race in training. Eighty-three countries in 2016 prohibited discrimination in promotions and demotions. In 2021, this number increased to 90 countries.

While less than three-quarters of countries prohibited racial discrimination in training in Europe and Central Asia (74%), these prohibitions were still more common than in every other region. Similar trends were found for promotions and/or demotions.

The number of countries guaranteeing equal pay for work of equal value, increased from 34 in 2016 to 41 in 2021. Overall, including guarantees both of equal pay for work of equal value and equal pay for equal work, 91 countries in 2016 and 96 countries in 2021 guaranteed equal pay across racial and ethnic groups. More countries in Europe and Central Asia (77%) prohibited racial discrimination in pay than those in sub-Saharan Africa (56%), the Middle East and North Africa (27%), and South Asia (27%).

Terminations

In 2016, 106 countries prohibited racial discrimination in terminating employment. That number increased to 112 countries in 2021. Prohibitions of racial/ethnic discrimination in terminations were most common in Europe and Central Asia (74%), Sub-Saharan Africa (71%), and the Americas (60%). In contrast, less than a third of countries prohibited racial discrimination in terminations in East Asia and Pacific (30%) and South Asia (25%).

Only 66 countries explicitly prohibited workplace harassment based on race/ethnicity in 2016. By 2021, that number had increased to 72. Only a minority of countries prohibited racial and/or ethnic harassment in all regions except Europe and Central Asia.

Indirect discrimination

Sixty-three countries prohibited indirect discrimination based on race and/or ethnicity in 2016, increasing to 71 countries in 2021. Only a third of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a fifth of those in East Asia and Pacific and the Americas, and an eighth of those in South Asia explicitly addressed indirect racial/ethnic discrimination. No countries in the Middle East and North Africa did so.

Intertwined, multiple and intersectional discrimination

Prohibitions of discrimination based on both race and/or ethnicity and religion were widespread: 151 countries prohibited at least some aspect of workplace discrimination based on both characteristics in 2021. However, only 117 countries prohibited at least some aspect of workplace discrimination based on both race and/or ethnicity and social class. Even fewer prohibited discrimination based on both race and/or ethnicity and foreign national origin (90 countries) or migration status (81 countries).

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa were most likely to prohibit discrimination based on race and social class, as well as discrimination based on race and foreign national origin. While prohibitions of racial discrimination and religion, social class, or foreign national origin were comparatively high in the Americas, prohibitions of discrimination based on migration status were markedly lower. While nearly two-thirds of countries in Europe and Central Asia addressed migration status alongside race, only half prohibited discrimination based on foreign national origin ( Figure 4 ).

Finally, a minority of countries explicitly addressed the concepts of intersectionality or multiple discrimination in their discrimination legislation. Kenya's National Gender and Equality Commission Act recognizes intersectionality in defining marginalized groups to be people “disadvantaged by discrimination on one or more of the grounds in Article 27(4) of the Constitution” which includes “race, sex, pregnancy, marital status, health status, ethnic or social origin, colour, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, dress, language or birth” ( 2012 ). Australia's Racial Discrimination Act prohibits “acts done for 2 or more reasons” where “one of the reasons is the race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin of a person” ( 1975 ). In Macedonia, the Law on Prevention of and Protection Against Discrimination defines multiple discrimination to be a severe form of discrimination ( 2010 ).

Only a smaller minority of countries (38) took the additional step of requiring employers to take one or more specific measures to prevent racial discrimination. An additional 8 countries had general language requiring employers to take preventative steps, without specifying what those steps would look like.

Protections in the event of discrimination

In the event that discrimination occurred and employees filed a report or initiated litigation, a modest majority of countries took the important step of prohibiting retaliation against the employee who filed the complaint. Seventy-eight countries prohibited employers from retaliating in any way, an additional 7 prohibited harassment or any disciplinary action, and 26 only prohibited dismissing the employee ( Table 1 ). A similar number of countries (76) protected employees who participated in investigations from being retaliated against.

Are any employers exempt?

When countries had laws in place prohibiting discrimination, they overwhelmingly applied to all employers. In rare cases small businesses were exempt, including in 5 countries in the case of hiring, 4 countries in the case of training and terminations, and 3 countries in the case of pay and promotions and demotions ( Table 2 ). Charities and nonprofits had similarly uncommon exemptions. The group that was most frequently exempted from these prohibitions of racial discrimination were religious organizations. Fourteen countries exempted religious organizations from bans on discriminations based on race in hiring, training, and terminations, 13 exempted religious organizations in terms of racial discrimination in promotions and demotions, and 9 in the case of pay.

Around the world there has been an explosion of demonstrations and attention to the critical issue of racial discrimination over the past two years, building on the many decades of activism urging action on racial injustices that came before. And while catalyzed by state violence, these recent demonstrations also clearly took aim at the deeply entrenched economic disparities across race that persist across countries, which were on full display as workers from marginalized racial and ethnic groups lost jobs in historic numbers two months into the pandemic.

In response, governments and companies worldwide pledged action. Ensuring that discrimination is clearly prohibited in every country is an essential first step both for changing norms and attitudes and for giving people who are discriminated against more tools to combat the discrimination. Modest progress has been made over the past five years in increasing guarantees of equality, regardless of race and ethnicity, around the world. Between 2016 and 2021, the number of countries legally prohibiting racial and ethnic discrimination in the workplace increased and the strength of provisions improved. Eight more countries prohibited discrimination in hiring and 6 more in terminations. Seven more countries guaranteed equal pay for work of equal value based on race. Moreover, 8 more countries prohibited indirect discrimination based on race and ethnicity.

Yet unconscionable gaps remain. More than 1 in 5 countries have no prohibition of workplace discrimination based on race. Moreover, more than 1 in 4 countries, 54 in total, have no prohibition against racial discrimination in pay. Furthermore, more than a dozen countries provide for exceptions to the prohibition of racial discrimination for religious organizations.

Many countries also fail to offer adequate legal protection against both direct racial discrimination and other forms of discrimination that often occur simultaneously, have disparate impacts on the basis of race, and/or serve as proxies for racial discrimination. For example, in many countries around the world, marginalized racial and ethnic groups are also disproportionately poor due to historic and ongoing economic exclusion. In settings where racial and ethnic discrimination is prohibited but social class-based discrimination remains allowed, class-based discrimination can be used to practically discriminate based on race and ethnicity, particularly if indirect discrimination is likewise unaddressed in the law. Yet 76 countries fail to prohibit discrimination based on both social class and race and/or ethnicity; 121 lack protections against indirect discrimination; and 58 countries lack either protection.

Similarly, while discrimination based both on race/ethnicity and migration status is pervasive, many countries lack comprehensive protections addressing these and related grounds. The evidence illustrating why stronger laws are needed is compelling. For example, a study on labor force participation in Western Europe found that migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia earned over 20% less income than Western European internal migrants. Compared to internal Western European migrants, external migrants from MENA and sub-Saharan Africa regions were also less likely to be employed and part of the labor force in Europe ( Kislev, 2017 ). National laws that formally and explicitly prohibit multiple forms of discrimination may help protect more individuals and reduce inequalities in employment opportunities. Yet, 112 countries fail to prohibit discrimination based on both migration status and race and/or ethnicity and 103 fail to do so for foreign national origin and race and/or ethnicity.

Finally, even when legal protections are in place, it is crucial that there are both prevention and enforcement mechanisms. 107 countries prohibited racial and ethnic discrimination but did not place any explicit requirements on employers to try to prevent discrimination. Only 38 countries required employers to take specific steps and only an additional 8 required employers generally to work towards prevention.

The critical need to accelerate progress

The significant overall gaps in protections, alongside the findings that the expansion over the past five years of laws prohibiting racial discrimination at work has been slow, underscores the need to accelerate the pace of change on legal reforms—as a matter of human rights, an important determinant of individual and household incomes, and a prerequisite for countries to reach their full potential. Ensuring equal opportunities in employment on the basis of race and ethnicity has vast implications for individuals, families, and their broader communities. A significant body of literature has documented how access to employment, job quality, and adequate income shape mental and physical health, overall life satisfaction, and the ability to meet material needs ( Calvo et al ., 2015 ; Murphy and Athansou, 1999 ). When work opportunities are unevenly distributed by race due to both individual and structural discrimination, these disparities drive broader inequalities.

Moreover, all countries have agreed to do so. The Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by all UN member states in 2015, commit governments to “empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status” and “[e]nsure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome, including by eliminating discriminatory laws, policies and practices and promoting appropriate legislation, policies and action in this regard” ( United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2015 ). By adopting the SDGs, countries worldwide agreed to realize these commitments by 2030. To meet that timeline, accelerating the pace of change on fundamental anti-discrimination protections is essential.

This builds on a long history of international agreements guaranteeing equal rights regardless of race or ethnicity, including in the field of employment. Many of these have been in place for decades. Foremost among them is the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination ( United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1965 ), which has been ratified by 182 countries ( United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2021c ), declares that States Parties have a duty to “prohibit and to eliminate racial discrimination in all its forms and to guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, to equality before the law, notably in the enjoyment of (…) The rights to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work, to protection against unemployment, to equal pay for equal work, to just and favourable remuneration” ( United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1965 ).

In fact, nearly every major global human rights agreement commits countries to treating all people equally regardless of race or ethnicity. These include, among others, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted as the first global agreement of the United Nations and considered binding on all countries ( United Nations General Assembly, 1948 ), the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, a binding treaty ratified by 171 countries ( United Nations General Assembly, 1966 ; United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2021b ), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by 173 countries ( United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1966 , 2021a ).

Finally, beyond its importance to individuals, families, and communities and deep intrinsic value as a matter of human rights, ending racial discrimination in the labor market has significant implications for economies and companies. For example, in the US alone, estimates from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco find that closing the racial gaps in employment-to-population ratios between 1990 and 2019 would have boosted 2019 GDP by over $150 billion ( Buckman et al. , 2021 ), while other research has forecast that closing the racial earnings gap by 2050 would boost GDP by 22% ( Turner, 2018 ). Likewise, a significant body of evidence demonstrates that greater racial and ethnic diversity within companies, including on boards, improves their financial performance and degree of innovation ( Erhardt et al. , 2003 ; Herring, 2009 ; Cheong and Sinnakkannu, 2014 ; Thomas et al. , 2016 ; Hunt et al. , 2018 ). For example, a study of 492 firms found a strong relationship between ethnic and linguistic diversity and total revenue, dividends, sales and productivity ( Churchill, 2019 ). Particularly as more companies work and hire trans-nationally, the extent to which laws in all countries prohibit racial and ethnic discrimination at work matters to overall performance.

Research limitations and the need for a broader research agenda on policies and outcomes

While this study provides an important first look at prohibitions against racial and ethnic discrimination at work in all the world's countries, it has important limitations. This study did not quantify laws related to intersectional discrimination, including, among others, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Yet as past scholarship and case law have shown, addressing each individual basis for discrimination still may not be enough to reach the unique forms of discrimination that arise when multiple grounds of discrimination intersect, particularly if workers are required to prove each of their discrimination claims discretely and sequentially. Explicit protections against intersectional discrimination, and judiciaries willing and trained to apply them, may be needed ( Crenshaw, 1989 ; Fredman, 2016 ).

Future research should also examine prohibitions of discrimination in working conditions, given the evidence of inequalities. For example, research has shown that non-Hispanic Black workers and foreign-born Hispanic workers are disproportionately hired into jobs with the higher injury risk and increased prevalence of work-related disability ( Seabury et al. , 2017 ). Another study on COVID-19 job exposures found that Latinx and Black frontline workers were overrepresented in lower status occupations associated with higher risk and less adequate COVID-19 protections, contributing to the higher prevalence of infection in these populations ( Goldman et al. , 2021 ).

Further, we need to measure laws that reduce bias in informal as well as formal mechanisms that play a large role in the recruitment, hiring, and promotion processes, as well as in determining working conditions. Evidence has shown social networks and informal relationships can not only impact recruitment, but also can contribute to inequities in salary negotiations and mentorship at the hiring stage ( Seidel et al. , 2000 ; Spafford et al. , 2006 ).

These expansions on the law and policy data presented here should be part of a broader research agenda on racial equity in the global labor market that examines not only which laws and policies are in place but what impacts they are having. As with other policy areas, developing longitudinal quantitative, globally comparative measures of anti-discrimination laws helps make it possible for researchers to rigorously analyze the relationship between policy change and outcomes, producing actionable evidence about “what works” across countries ( Raub et al. , 2022 ). However, even with the new policy data we have developed, improvements in outcomes data will be essential to measure the impact globally of advances and legal gaps. Globally comparative data on experiences of racial discrimination across countries which is essential for measuring the impact of legal change globally has been limited to date for several reasons including the wide range across countries of who suffers racial and ethnic discrimination and the variability of country willingness to collect data.

Addressing discrimination: a global responsibility

While the workplace is only one location where racial and ethnic discrimination occurs, it is a crucial one. Ensuring equal opportunity to be hired and equal treatment in pay, working conditions, and promotions together influences whether individuals can lead full work lives, contribute to household income, and not only meet basic needs but also invest in the future of their families and communities. Moreover, global agreements have committed countries around the world to combatting discrimination based on race and ethnicity, including in the specific context of employment.

For these international instruments to have full impact, however, specific country-level legislation that operationalizes their commitments and prohibits discrimination in the workplace is essential. To accelerate progress toward ending racial and ethnic discrimination in employment worldwide—a basic human right—we need to monitor the steps countries are taking to address and eliminate discrimination in all aspects of work, including hiring, promotion, pay, and terminations. While legal guarantees are not enough—and norm change, leadership, and social movements are likewise critical to successfully eliminating discrimination both at work and more broadly—clear stipulations that companies are not allowed to discriminate are essential, as are strong and regularly updated accountability mechanisms.

Do countries prohibit racial and/or ethnic discrimination in all aspects of work?

Number of countries prohibiting racial and/or ethnic discrimination at work by aspect of work and year

Percentage of countries prohibiting racial and/or ethnic discrimination at work by region and aspect of work

Number of countries prohibiting at least some discrimination at work based on race and/or ethnicity and intersecting characteristics by region

Countries with prohibitions of retaliation against those reporting discrimination

Countries with exceptions to prohibitions of racial and/or ethnic discrimination

The World Bank's (WB) regional classifications can be found here: https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups . While Malta is classified as part of the Middle East and North Africa by the WB, it is also a member of the European Union (EU) and therefore more likely to have legislation reflecting the EU's principles and directives. Thus, we classified Malta as a part of Europe and Central Asia. All other countries retained their WB classifications.

Adisa , T.A. , Osabutey , E.L.C. , Gbadamosi , G. and Mordi , C. ( 2017 ), “ The challenges of employee resourcing: the perceptions of managers in Nigeria ”, The Career Development International , Vol.  22 No.  6 , pp.  703 - 723 .

Agocs , C. ( 2002 ), “ Canada's employment equity legislation and policy, 1987-2000: the gap between policy and practice ”, International Journal of Manpower , Vol.  23 No.  3 , pp.  256 - 276 .

Arceo-Gomez , E. and Campos-Vazquez , R. ( 2014 ), “ Race and marriage in the labor market: a discrimination correspondence study in a developing country ”, American Economic Review , Vol.  104 No.  5 , pp.  376 - 380 .

Baert , S. ( 2018 ), “ Hiring discrimination: an overview of (almost) all correspondence experiments since 2005 ”, Audit Studies: Behind the Scenes with Theory, Method, and Nuance , pp.  63 - 77 .

Bergman , M.E. , Langhout , R.D. , Palmieri , P.A. , Cortina , L.M. and Fitzgerald , L.F. ( 2002 ), “ The (un)reasonableness of reporting: antecedents and consequences of reporting sexual harassment ”, Journal of Applied Psychology , Vol.  87 No.  2 , pp.  230 - 242 .

Bertrand , M. and Duflo , E. ( 2017 ), “ Field experiments on discrimination ”, in Banerjee , A.V. and Duflo , E. (Eds), Handbook of Economic Field Experiments , Elsevier , Amsterdam , Vol.  1 , pp.  309 - 393 .

Buckman , S.R. , Choi , L.Y. , Daly , M.C. and Seitelman , L.M. ( 2021 ), The Economic Gains from Equity , Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper , San Francisco .

Calvo , E. , Mair , C. and Sarkisian , N. ( 2015 ), “ Individual troubles, shared troubles: the multiplicative effect of individual and country-level unemployment on life satisfaction in 95 Nations (1981-2009) ”, Social Forces , Vol.  93 No.  4 , pp.  1625 - 1653 .

Chay , K.Y. ( 1998 ), “ The impact of federal civil rights policy on black economic progress: evidence from the equal employment opportunity act of 1972 ”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review , Vol.  51 No.  4 , pp.  608 - 632 .

Cheong , C.W.H. and Sinnakkannu , J. ( 2014 ), “ Ethnic diversity and firm financial performance: evidence from Malaysia ”, Journal of Asia-Pacific Business , Vol.  15 No.  1 , pp. 73 - 100 , doi: 10.1080/10599231.2014.872973 .

Churchill , S.A. ( 2019 ), “ Firm financial performance in sub-Saharan Africa: the role of ethnic diversity ”, Empirical Economics , Vol.  57 No.  3 , pp.  1 - 14 .

Coleman , M.G. ( 2003 ), “ Job skill and Black male wage discrimination ”, Social Science Quarterly , Vol.  84 , pp.  892 - 906 .

Collins , W.J. ( 2003 ), “ The labor market impact of state-level anti-discrimination laws, 1940-1960 ”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review , Vol.  56 No.  2 , pp.  244 - 272 .

Couch , K.A. and Fairlie , R. ( 2010 ), “ Last hired, first fired? Black-white unemployment and the business cycle ”, Demography , Vol.  47 No.  1 , pp.  227 - 247 .

Creese , G. ( 2010 ), “ Erasing English language competency: African migrants in Vancouver, Canada ”, International Migration and Integration , Vol.  11 No.  3 , pp.  295 - 313 , doi: 10.1007/s12134-010-0139-3 .

Crenshaw , K. ( 1989 ), “ Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics ”, The University of Chicago Legal Forum , p. 139 .

del Mar Alonso-Almeida , M. ( 2014 ), “ Women (and mothers) in the workforce: worldwide factors ”, Women's Studies International Forum , Vol.  44 , pp.  164 - 171 .

Demetriou , C. ( 2016 ), “ The equality body finds that restrictions in access to self-employment for third country nationals amount to unlawful discrimination, Cyprus ”, European Commission , available at: https://www.equalitylaw.eu/downloads/3840-cyprus-the-equality-body-finds-that-restrictions-in-access-to-self-employment-for-third-country-nationals-amount-to-unlawful-discrimination-pdf-95-kb ( accessed 7 January 2022 ).

Derous , E. and Pepermans , R. ( 2019 ), “ Gender discrimination in hiring: intersectional effects with ethnicity and cognitive job demands ”, Archives of Scientific Psychology , Vol.  7 No.  1 , pp.  40 - 49 .

Di Stasio , V. and Larsen , E.N. ( 2020 ), “ The racialized and gendered workplace: applying an intersectional lens to a field experiment on hiring discrimination in five european labor markets ”, Social Psychology Quarterly , Vol.  83 No.  3 , pp.  229 - 250 .

Donohue , J.J. and Heckman , J. ( 1991 ), “ Continuous versus episodic change: the impact of civil rights policy on the economic status of blacks ”, Journal of Economic Literature , Vol.  29 No.  4 , p. 1603 .

Dostie , B. and Javdani , M. ( 2020 ), “ Immigrants and workplace training: evidence from Canadian linked employer–employee data ”, Industrial Relations , Vol.  59 No.  2 , pp.  275 - 315 .

Drydakis , N. ( 2012 ), “ Roma women in Athenian firms: do they face wage bias? ”, Ethnic and Racial Studies , Vol.  35 No.  12 , pp.  2054 - 2074 .

Erhardt , N.L. , Werbel , J.D. and Shrader , C.B. ( 2003 ), “ Board of director diversity and firm financial performance ”, Corporate Governance , Vol.  11 No.  2 , pp. 102 - 111 , doi: 10.1111/1467-8683.00011 .

Fredman , S. ( 2016 ), “ Intersectional discrimination in EU gender equality and non-discrimination law ”, European Commission .

Goldman , N. , Pebley , A.R. , Lee , K. , Andrasfay , T. and Pratt , B. ( 2021 ), “ Racial and ethnic differentials in COVID-19-related job exposures by occupational standing in the US ”, PLoS One , Vol.  16 No.  9 .

Gorod , B.J. ( 2007 ), “ Rejecting reasonableness: a new look at title VII's anti-retaliation provision ”, American University Law Review , Vol.  56 No.  6 , pp.  1469 - 1524 .

Greene , D.W. ( 2017 ), “ Splitting hairs: the Eleventh Circuit’s take on workplace bans against Black women’s natural hair in EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions ”, University of Miami Law Review , Vol.  71 , p. 987 .

Hatch , S.L. , Gazard , B. , Williams , D.R. , Frissa , S. , Goodwin , L. , SelcoH , S.T. and Hotopf , M. ( 2016 ), “ Discrimination and common mental disorder among migrant and ethnic groups: findings from a South East London Community sample ”, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology , Vol.  51 No.  5 , pp.  689 - 701 .

Herring , C. ( 2009 ), “ Does diversity pay?: race, gender, and the business case for diversity ”, American Sociological Review , Vol.  74 No.  2 , pp. 208 - 224 , doi: 10.1177/000312240907400203 .

Hunt , V. , Prince , S. , Dixon-Fyle , S. and Yee , L. ( 2018 ), Delivering Through Diversity , McKinsey & Company , Los Angeles .

Javdani , M. ( 2020 ), “ Visible minorities and job mobility: evidence from a workplace panel survey ”, The Journal of Economic Inequality , Vol.  18 , pp. 491 - 524 .

Javdani , M. and McGee , A. ( 2018 ), “ Labor market mobility and the early-career outcomes of immigrant men ”, IZA Journal of Development and Migration , Vol.  8 No.  1 , pp.  1 - 28 .

Justesen , P. ( 2016 ), “ Board of Equal Treatment ruling on so-called ‘language barrier’, Denmark ”, European Commission , available at: https://www.equalitylaw.eu/downloads/3920-denmark-board-of-equal-treatment-ruling-on-so-called-language-barrier-pdf-131-kb ( accessed 7 January 2022 ).

Keenan , J.P. ( 1990 ), “ Upper-level managers and whistleblowing: determinants of perceptions of company encouragement and information about where to blow the whistle ”, Journal of Business and Psychology , Vol.  5 No.  2 , pp.  223 - 235 .

Kislev , E. ( 2017 ), “ Deciphering the ‘ethnic penalty’ of immigrants in Western Europe: a cross-classified multilevel analysis ”, Social Indicators Research , Vol.  134 No.  2 , pp.  725 - 745 , doi: 10.1007/s11205-016-1451-x .

Law on Prevention of and Protection Against Discrimination ( 2010 ), “ Skopje: constitutional court of the republic of Macedonia ”, No.  82 , available at: https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/5aa12ad47.pdf .

Leck , J.D. and Saunders , D.M. ( 1992 ), “ Canada's employment equity act: effects on employee selection ”, Population Research and Policy Review , Vol.  11 No.  1 , p. 21 .

Leck , J.D. , St. Onge, S. and Lalancette , I. ( 1995 ), “ Wage gap changes among organizations subject to the employment equity act ”, Canadian Public Policy , Vol.  21 No.  4 , pp.  387 - 400 .

Lessem , R. and Nakajima , K. ( 2019 ), “ Immigrant wages and recessions: evidence from undocumented Mexicans ”, European Economic Review , Vol.  114 , pp.  92 - 115 .

Luksyte , A. , Waite , E. , Avery , D.R. and Roy , R. ( 2013 ), “ Held to a different standard: racial differences in the impact of lateness on advancement opportunity ”, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology , Vol.  86 No.  2 , pp.  142 - 165 .

Mayiya , S. , Schachtebeck , C. and Diniso , C. ( 2019 ), “ Barriers to career progression of Black African middle managers: the South African perspective ”, Acta Universitatis Danubius Oeconomica , Vol.  15 No.  2 .

Mora , C. and Undurraga , E.A. ( 2013 ), “ Racialisation of immigrants at work: labour mobility and segmentation of Peruvian migrants in Chile ”, Bulletin of Latin American Research , Vol.  32 No.  3 , pp.  294 - 310 , doi: 10.1111/blar.12002 .

Murphy , G.C. and Athanasou , J.A. ( 1999 ), “ The effect of unemployment on mental health ”, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology , Vol.  72 No.  1 , pp.  83 - 99 .

National Gender and Equality Commission Act ( 2012 ), “ Ch. 5C, Nairobi: national council for law reporting with the authority of the attorney-general ”, available at: www.kenyalaw.org .

Piazzalunga , D. ( 2015 ), “ Is there a double-negative effect? Gender and ethnic wage differentials in Italy ”, Labour , Vol.  29 No.  3 , pp.  243 - 269 .

Pillay , S. , Ramphul , N. , Dorasamy , N. and Meyer , D. ( 2018 ), “ Predictors of whistle-blowing intentions: an analysis of multi-level variables ”, Administration and Society , Vol.  50 No.  2 , pp.  186 - 216 .

Racial Discrimination Act ( 1975 ), “ Barton: attorney General's department, Australian government ”, available at: https://www.ag.gov.au/rights-and-protections/human-rights-and-anti-discrimination/australias-anti-discrimination-law .

Rafferty , A. ( 2020 ), “ Skill underutilization and under-skilling in Europe: the role of workplace discrimination ”, Work, Employment and Society , Vol.  34 No.  2 , pp.  317 - 335 .

Raub , A. , Sprague , A. , Waisath , W. , Nandi , A. , Atabay , E. , Vincent , I. , Moreno , G. , Earle , A. , Perry , N. and Heymann , J. ( 2022 ), “ Utilizing a comparative policy resource from the WORLD policy analysis center covering constitutional rights, laws, and policies across 193 countries for outcome analysis, monitoring, and accountability ”, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice , Vol.  24 No.  4 , pp. 313 - 328 , doi: 10.1080/13876988.2021.1894073 .

Seabury , S.A. , Terp , S. and Boden , L.I. ( 2017 ), “ Racial and ethnic differences in the frequency of workplace injuries and prevalence of work-related disability ”, Health Affairs , Vol.  36 No.  2 , pp.  266 - 273 .

Seidel , M.-D.L. , Polzer , J.T. and Stewart , K.J. ( 2000 ), “ Friends in high places: the effects of social networks on discrimination in salary negotiations ”, Administrative Science Quarterly , Vol.  45 No.  1 , pp.  1 - 24 .

Spafford , M.M. , Nygaard , V.L. , Gregor , F. and Boyd , M.A. ( 2006 ), “ ‘Navigating the different spaces’”: experiences of inclusion and isolation among racially minoritized faculty in Canada ”, The Canadian Journal of Higher Education , Vol.  36 No.  1 , pp.  1 - 27 .

Stalker , P. ( 1994 ), The Work of Strangers: A Survey of International Labour Migration , International Labour Office , Geneva .

Sunstein , C. ( 1996 ), “ On the expressive function of law ”, University of Pennsylvania Law Review , Vol.  144 No.  5 , pp.  2021 - 2053 .

Thomas , A. , Dougherty , J. , Strand , S. , Nayar , A. and Janani , M. ( 2016 ), Decoding Diversity: The Financial and Economic Returns to Diversity in Tech , Intel Corporation and Dalberg Global Development Advisors , New York .

Tomlinson , J. , Valizade , D. , Muzio , D. , Charlwood , A. and Aulakh , S. ( 2019 ), “ Privileges and penalties in the legal profession: an intersectional analysis of career progression ”, The British Journal of Sociology , Vol.  6 No.  70 , pp.  1043 - 1066 .

Turner , A. ( 2018 ), The Business Case for Racial Equity: A Strategy for Growth , W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Altarum , Battle Creek, MI .

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs ( 2015 ), “ Reduce inequality within and among countries, goal 10 ”, available at: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal10 (accessed 17 September 2021) .

United Nations General Assembly ( 1948 ), “ Universal declaration of human rights, resolution 217 A (III) ”, available at: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ ( accessed 15 July 2021 ).

United Nations General Assembly ( 1966 ), “ International covenant on economic, social and cultural rights ”, available at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cescr.aspx ( accessed 16 July 2021 ).

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ( 1965 ), “ International convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination ”, available at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cerd.aspx ( accessed 16 July 2021 ).

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ( 1966 ), “ International convention on civil and political rights ”, available at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx ( accessed 16 July 2021 ).

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ( 2021a ), “ Status of ratification interactive dashboard - International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ”, available at: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?chapter=4&clang=_en&mtdsg_no=IV-4&src=IND (accessed 16 July 2021) .

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ( 2021b ), “ Status of ratification interactive dashboard - International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ”, available at: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=IV-3&chapter=4 (accessed 15 July 2021) .

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ( 2021c ), “ Status of ratification interactive dashboard - International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination ”, available at: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=IV-2&chapter=4&clang=_en (accessed 16 July 2021) .

Weichselbaumer , D. ( 2020 ), “ Multiple discrimination against female immigrants wearing headscarves ”, ILR Review , Vol.  73 No.  3 , pp.  600 - 627 .

Yap , M. ( 2010 ), “ The intersection of gender and race: effects on the incidence of promotions ”, Canadian Journal of Career Development , Vol.  9 No.  2 , pp. 22 - 32 .

Yap , M. and Konrad , A.M. ( 2009 ), “ Gender and racial differentials in promotions: is there a sticky floor, a mid-level bottleneck, or a glass ceiling? ”, Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations , Vol.  64 No.  4 , pp.  593 - 619 .

Yu , H. ( 2020 ), “ Multiracial feminism: an intersectional approach to examining female officers’ occupational barriers in federal law enforcement ”, Women and Criminal Justice , Vol.  31 No.  5 , pp. 327 - 341 , doi: 10.1080/08974454.2020.1734146 .

Zabalza , Z. and Zafiris , T. ( 1985 ), “ The effect of Britain's anti-discriminatory legislation on relative pay and employment ”, The Economic Journal , Vol.  95 No.  379 , pp.  679 - 699 .

Zempi , I. ( 2020 ), “ ‘Looking back, I wouldn't join up again’: the lived experiences of police officers as victims of bias and prejudice perpetrated by fellow staff within an English police force ”, Police Practice and Research: An International Journal , Vol.  2 No.  21 , pp.  33 - 48 .

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Corresponding author

Related articles, all feedback is valuable.

Please share your general feedback

Report an issue or find answers to frequently asked questions

Contact Customer Support

Real Life Examples of Discrimination in the Workplace

It’s difficult to believe that today, in the 21st century, discrimination is still a major issue, but as much as we would like to think that we live in a world full of peace, harmony and widespread acceptance, this just sadly isn’t the case. 

In fact, more than 25% of workers in the UK have reported having experienced workplace discrimination in some form, according to a study conducted by Sky to mark National Inclusion Week in 2018 which identified that prejudice towards gender, race and age remains fairly commonplace in UK businesses. 

That self-same study recognised that a youth-driven revolution could be underway to counteract this outdated way of thinking as ‘Generation Z’ – the under 25s population – are twice as likely to feel that employers should do more to promote inclusion in the workplace compared to the baby boomers of the workforce (the over 55s). 

Cases of Discrimination in the Workplace

If that is the case, we are looking at the potential for a very happy future in terms of where the world stands on discrimination, but it would seem that with over a quarter of the UK’s working population still admitting to being subject to such prejudice, that we have a long way to go before we get there, as you can see from the cases below. 

Starbucks Dyslexia Case

Starbucks employee Meseret Kumulchew was accused of fraud as her employer claimed she was falsifying documents after she mistakenly entered incorrect information when recording fridge temperatures in a duty roster. As a result, she was given lesser duties, taking away vital parts of her supervisor position and was told she needed to retrain before she could continue with those responsibilities which made up the job she loves.

In an interview, Meseret expressed that she was made to feel like a fraud and was on the verge of wanting to end her life. The only thing that held her back was the thought of her children. 

Meseret took Starbucks to an employment tribunal for disability discrimination as she stated that she had been upfront with her employees from the start, telling them that she was Dyslexic which means that she has difficulties with reading, writing and telling the time. She also advised them that she is a visual learner, meaning that she needs to be physically shown how to complete a task in order to learn. 

The tribunal found that Starbucks failed to make reasonable adjustments for Meseret and had discriminated against her due to the effects of her Dyslexia. It was also found that she was victimised by her employer and that there appeared to be little or no knowledge or understanding of equality issues within the business. 

Richemont Race Discrimination Case

Cheryl Spragg, an employee of Richemont (UK), which owns luxury brands including Cartier and Montblanc, was spied on by her employer, denied the opportunity to progress within the company and was bullied by HR and other staff members as a result of her skin colour.

Following a back injury, Richemont placed Cheryl under close surveillance for a number of days, following her to a wedding and even receiving images of her home and garden. Undoubtedly, this act was unnerving, intimidating and upsetting for her. 

Cheryl was also refused internal progression on the basis that she was black and had applied for the same post on three different occasions, with all three of the recruitment decisions being made by the same people. It was found that the company had a preference for white Europeans and the judge ruling in Cheryl’s claim against race discrimination in the workplace agrees that this was an act of direct discrimination since there was a lack of transparency and properly structured processes for scoring, marking and record-keeping as well as a complete absence of interview records. The HR team had no equality and diversity training and there were no black staff members at a senior level or on the HR team. 

In addition, Cheryl had been subject to bullying when other staff members refused to enter a lift with her which was found as a violation of her dignity. These employees were said to have laughed and pulled faces when Cheryl held the lift door open for them – they walked straight passed and waited for another lift to come. This incident meets the very definition of harassment under the Equality Act 2010 .  

When Cheryl complained to the HR department about the various events which she considered to be discriminatory, she was told to look for a new job and was accused of causing her colleagues distress. She was even told in an email from the HR team that she wasn’t the only ‘black member of staff’ within her team and no other racism allegations had been raised in the past. 

After the judge heard Cheryl’s case and considered the evidence, she won her claim and was awarded compensation for the traumatic and humiliating experience. 

ONS Sex Discrimination Case

Macro-economics specialist, Olwen Renowden, found herself a victim of sex discrimination when she was refused for two open positions at a grade six level by ONS – a role she was more than suitable for, holding professional credentials from some of the world’s most prestigious macro-economics employers such as the Bank of England and the IMF.

It was noted early on by Olwen that the company employed no female economists at grade six level, despite a headcount of over one hundred; and the posts that she and another female candidate (also more than qualified for the role) had applied for were both filled by male applicants – both of whom were young, inexperienced and had never worked at a grade six level prior to their appointment, let alone a specialism in macro-economics.

An additional vacancy was created for employees who had passed the grade six promotion board; however, this was only ever made available to male prospects – female candidates were not offered the same opportunity. 

Olwen raised a grievance but, unfortunately, her appeal was not upheld and she subsequently resigned from ONS. She refused to back down though, and applied to the Employment Tribunal with her case in January 2019 where is was agrees that favouritism was shown towards male staff. What’s more, the tribunal found that those who should have addressed the issue failed to do so, leading to the conclusion that the approach to gender balance pointed towards a culture where discrimination and, in particulat, sex discrimination, is not properly understood by those who are required to ensure its elimination. 

The tribunal found that Owlen’s claims of sex discrimination were successful and the ONS was ordered to pay compensation and interest. 

More about Workplace Discrimination

Here are only a small handful of cases of discimination in the workplace that have occurred in recent years; however, there are a host of other examples which you can view by simply doing a Google search for cases of discrimination in the workplace. 

I think we can all agree that cases like this shouldn’t be making the news. Not because they shouldn’t be reported – while discrimination is a problem, it should always be made known – but because stories like these shouldn’t be happening in the first place; and if you’ve been reading through the cases in this post in horror, hoping that nobody on your payroll is being made to feel discriminated against – or even the ones being prejudice – never fear. Read more about workplace discrimination and how you can combat it as an employer in our post Types of Discrimination in the Workplace . 

Leave a Comment

• Employees 2
• Managing staff 46
• Operations 18
• Small Business 19

Help your small business with HR Software that works.

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Advance articles
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• About European Sociological Review
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Introduction, selection of countries, a harmonized cross-national field experiment, summary and conclusion, supplementary data, acknowledgements, gender discrimination in hiring: evidence from a cross-national harmonized field experiment.

• Article contents
• Figures & tables

Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund, Bram Lancee, Edvard Nergård Larsen, Javier G Polavieja, Jonas Radl, Ruta Yemane, Gender Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from a Cross-National Harmonized Field Experiment, European Sociological Review , Volume 38, Issue 3, June 2022, Pages 337–354, https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcab043

• Permissions Icon Permissions

Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus , while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.

Women have traditionally been disadvantaged in the labour market, and much scholarship has documented patterns of and trends in gender inequalities (e.g. Weichselbaumer and Winter-Ebmer, 2005 ; Carlsson, 2011 ). However, women’s and men’s working lives have changed considerably since the mid-20th century ( Goldin, 2014 ). In nearly all OECD countries, women now have higher educational attainment than men ( OECD, 2015 ). In many countries, women comprise more than 40 per cent of the labour force ( Pew Research Center, 2017 ), and, although the process is slow, there is some evidence that the gender gap in earnings is converging ( Jacobsen, Khamis and Yuksel, 2015 ; Blau and Kahn, 2017 ; Neumark, 2018 ). People’s attitudes have also changed; in particular, we have seen decreasing support for traditional gender norms and increasing support for women’s employment ( Fernández, 2013 ).

All trends towards equalization notwithstanding, gender inequalities in the labour market still exist. Broadly construed, there are two explanations for why this is the case. First, women are treated differently from men within the same jobs, and second, women and men are sorted into different jobs, with lower earnings and fewer promotion prospects in typically female-dominated jobs. Studies have, however, shown that when men and women work in the same jobs in the same firms, gender differences in earnings are significantly diminished or even eradicated (e.g. Petersen and Morgan, 1995 ). This gives more credibility to the sorting explanation. Indeed, we know that occupational sex segregation is widespread ( Chang, 2004 ), and that men and women work in jobs with unequal compensation ( Levanon and Grusky, 2016 ). Scholars have therefore argued for the exigency to better understand the sorting process of men and women into different jobs ( Petersen and Saporta, 2004 ). We can think of two competing explanations. First, the supply side argument addresses educational and occupational choices: men and women choose different occupations and therefore apply for different jobs. Alternatively, men and women apply for the same jobs, but women are discriminated against when they apply for jobs with higher earnings, more responsibilities, etc. This demand side argument is related to employers’ hiring decisions, and this study aims to make a contribution to the literature by testing the discrimination explanation.

Hiring processes are contingent on employers’ decision-making, and crucial elements of their decisions usually remain opaque to researchers. Thus, measuring discrimination is difficult. Supply-side data can reveal gender gaps in labour market outcomes, but we can never rule out the possibility that observed gender gaps are driven by unobserved factors pertaining to the supply side rather than by employers’ discriminatory practices on the demand side. Therefore, experimental designs are more suitable for detecting discrimination ( Azmat and Petrongolo, 2014 ; Gaddis, 2018 ). While a weakness of laboratory experiments is external validity, field experiments can, through manipulation of one (or more) treatment variable(s), e.g. the applicant’s gender, provide real-world causal estimates of treatment effects on employers’ hiring decisions.

Previous Research

Social scientists have conducted randomized field experiments to detect hiring discrimination since the 1970s ( Riach and Rich, 2002 ). Perhaps surprisingly, previous studies on hiring discrimination of male and female job applications show very mixed findings. Table 1 gives an overview of the most relevant field experiments on gender discrimination in hiring, and we comment on the most important findings below.

Previous field experiments on gender discrimination in hiring

Note: B = blue collar; W = white collar.

Source : own elaboration.

Some experiments found advantages for men over women ( Neumark, Bank and Van Nort, 1996 ; Petit, 2007 ; Zhou, Zhang and Song, 2013 ; Duguet, Loïc and Petit, 2017 ; González, Cortina and Rodríguez, 2019 ), whereas other experiments found advantages for women over men ( Jackson, 2009 ; Carlsson, 2011 ; Carlsson and Eriksson, 2017 ). Some studies found hiring discrimination against both men and women, depending on parental status ( Correll, Benard and Paik, 2007 ) or gender composition and type of job ( Weichselbaumer, 2004 ; Yavorsky, 2019 ), while other studies found no gender discrimination at all ( Albert, Escot and Fernández-Cornejo, 2011 ; Capéan et al. , 2012; Carlsson et al. , 2014 ; Carlsson and Erikson, 2017; Bygren, Erlandsson and Gähler, 2017 ). Some studies found evidence of hiring discrimination against women in high-level jobs ( Riach and Rich, 2002 ; Baert, De Pauw and Deschacht, 2016 ), while others did not ( Williams and Ceci, 2015 ). These inconsistencies in findings might reflect true cross-national differences in gender discrimination. If institutional contexts, such as labour market policies, affect employers’ hiring decisions, they might, all else equal, behave differently in different national contexts ( Gangl and Ziefle, 2009 ). However, as these experiments are adapted to national contexts, and the included occupations vary considerably, inconsistencies in findings might also be an artefact of heterogeneity of research designs.

More consistently across contexts, field experiments on gender discrimination show that men are discriminated when they apply for female occupations, and women when they apply for male occupations ( Riach and Rich, 2002 , 2006 ; Booth and Leigh, 2010 ; Carlsson, 2011 ; Rich, 2014 ). ‘However, discrimination against men in “female” occupations was always much higher than that against women in “male” occupations’ ( Riach and Rich, 2002 : pp. F504–505). One study also found discrimination of men in female-dominated occupations, and no gender differences in hiring in mixed or male-dominated occupations ( Ahmed, Granberg and Khanna, 2021 ). Thus, despite the obvious temptation, we cannot directly compare field-experimental evidence on gender discrimination across countries, due to heterogeneity in research designs across countries and time-periods.

To address this limitation, we make use of a harmonized cross-national field experiment in six countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States [The Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration and Markets (GEMM) study, conducted by Lancee et al. , 2019b ]. 1 To our knowledge, the GEMM study is the first randomized field experiment with a deliberate cross-national comparative design ( Di Stasio and Lancee, 2019 ). These data allow us to provide new and rigorous evidence on gender discrimination in the first phase of the hiring process in six occupations in six countries. We contribute to the literature by analysing hiring discrimination within and across countries with different institutional characteristics.

Gender Discrimination: Theoretical Considerations

Hiring new employees always involves an element of risk-taking, as employers cannot know beforehand how an individual will perform. Employers rely on the information available in the cover letter and CV but may still be uncertain about the applicants’ skills. If employers believe members of a particular group are more productive than others, they might regard group membership as an informative cue. Obviously, employers’ expectations might be wrong, as they may rely on unfounded stereotypes about certain groups. In addition, even if employers’ beliefs are correct in terms of average group-level characteristics, individual job applicants may deviate substantially from a given group characteristic. 2

Discrimination against Women

Several perspectives explain why employers discriminate against women. We have grouped the relevant theoretical approaches into two broader categories: (i) cultural perspectives focusing on social norms and gender stereotypes, and (ii) the economic-rational perspective addressing statistical discrimination.

According to cultural perspectives, employers rely on gender stereotypes and gender-differentiated work expectations. In Joan Acker’s seminal work on gendered organizations, gender inequality is an inbuilt characteristic of work organizations ( Acker, 1990 ; Rudman and Phelan, 2008 ; Williams, Muller and Kilanski, 2012 ). Of particular importance is the norm of the ‘ideal worker’, working full-time without family obligations. As women’s work traditionally has been confined to the domestic sphere, this norm would disadvantage women in hiring situations ( Acker, 1990 ). Even in large, modern organizations, there is evidence that women are held to other standards than men, which might explain the persistence of the glass ceiling in career promotion. The so-called ‘paradox of meritocracy’ ( Castilla and Benard, 2010 ) implies that top-down directives oriented towards fairness and efficiency seem incapable of neutralizing discriminatory gender attitudes and may even reinforce the adverse effects of unconscious bias. Thus, despite societal trends towards gender convergence, theories about gendered organizations lead us to expect that men have an advantage over women in virtually all hiring processes.

The theory of statistical discrimination builds on the assumption that employers engage in cost-benefit calculations ( Arrow, 1972 ; Phelps, 1972 ). This economic-rational perspective leads us to expect that employers assess the potential productivity of job applicants by their observable characteristics, such as human capital, and attribute average group characteristics to them to assess their unobservable characteristics ( Fang and Moro, 2011 ). Due to productivity gains and because hiring in itself is costly, employers can be expected to be looking for stable workers. Given that women are more likely to be absent due to family responsibilities, employers would assess men’s productivity higher and discriminate against women, all else equal.

To summarize, both cultural and economic-rational perspectives lead us to expect discrimination of female applicants, primarily due to employers’ beliefs about women’s higher level of absence associated with childcare.

Discrimination against Men and Women

As noted above, previous experiments show differential gender discrimination across male- and female-dominated occupations. The cultural perspectives might explain why. Psychologists have developed the stereotype content model, which proposes that people tend to perceive men as competent but not warm, and women as warm but not competent ( Glick and Fiske, 1996 ). People also perceive male-dominated jobs as requiring more competence and female-dominated jobs as requiring more warmth ( Cuddy, Fiske and Glick, 2008 ). As these stereotypes are associated both with individuals and jobs, it is highly plausible that employers discriminate applicants with the ‘wrong’ gender ( Bobbitt-Zeher, 2011 ). Thus, ‘if a caregiving job is thought to require warmth and men are thought to not possess much warmth, individuals may expect that a man will not be successful at a caregiving job’ ( Halper, Cowgill and Rios, 2019 : p. 2). By the same logic, employers would form negative performance expectations of women in—for instance—technical jobs. Thus, employers’ gender stereotypes might steer the process of matching jobs and job applicants. Theoretically, this argument is captured by the concept of sex typing of jobs ( Bielby and Baron, 1986 ; Glick, Zion and Nelson, 1988 ; Reskin and Roos, 1990 ), the role congruency model ( Cejka and Eagly, 1999 ), and the theory of gender categorization within work organizations ( Ridgeway, 1997 ).

The theory on statistical discrimination can also explain differential gender discrimination across male- and female-dominated occupations. As noted, most employers are looking for stable employees, and studies have documented that workers’ employment duration is sensitive to the sex typing of the job, so that women who enter a male-dominated occupation and men who enter a female-dominated occupation have disproportionately higher exit risks ( Torre, 2014 , 2018 ). Employers might be aware of this association and act accordingly. On closer inspection therefore, the differences between the cultural and the economic-rational perspectives are rather subtle, as both perspectives are compatible with the assumption that gender stereotypes are exogenously given and that employers are looking for the best match between an applicant and a job. 3 Both perspectives, therefore, lead us to expect discrimination against the minority sex in sex-typed jobs and to expect to find no prevalence of discrimination in gender-balanced jobs, ceteris paribus . The norm of the ‘ideal worker’, however, leads us to the generic expectation that women are discriminated against, independently of the sex typing of the job.

Theories on discrimination are primarily concerned with individual-level explanations, largely ignoring the role of country-level institutional contexts ( Reskin, 2000 ). However, the ‘opportunity structure for discrimination’ ( Petersen and Saporta, 2004 ) is likely to differ by macro-level factors, which we explain below.

The GEMM study is a fully harmonized field experiment on job hiring across six advanced economies that differ in a number of relevant macro-level characteristics. Because the number of policy and institutional characteristics varying across these countries is larger than the number of countries analysed and because these characteristics are highly endogenous, it is not possible to identify the effect of a single policy or institutional dimension. Our goal is therefore more modest: we want to test whether estimates of hiring discrimination of male and female applicants are robust across different policy and institutional contexts. If they are, we conclude that, despite their institutional differences, there is a common trend across these societies. If they are not, we interpret cross-national variation by considering country-specific characteristics that may affect employers’ propensity to discriminate. We consider three macro dimensions: (i) general labour market regulations and conditions, (ii) family policies, and (iii) cultural norms.

First, labour market regulations can influence employers’ hiring decisions by affecting the costs of job mismatch. When these costs are high, employers are likely to be more risk averse and to draw on statistical discrimination to reduce contractual hazards. If employment contracts with low termination costs are available to employers and if such contracts can be used for long time-periods, the match-or-miss pressure for employers will wane, thus reducing the impact of risk aversion on hiring decisions. The included countries differ markedly in the extent of labour market regulation (see Table 2 ); and we expect more gender discrimination related to the sex typing of jobs in countries with higher dismissal costs, such as Germany and the Netherlands. Another potential factor affecting the costs of discriminating is labour market tightness. If employers have a large pool of potential candidates, they are more prone to discriminate, even if only as a heuristic strategy to simplify the screening procedure ( Birkelund, 2016 ), than when they have a restricted supply of workers ( Baert, De Pauw and Deschacht, 2016 ). Spain is an outlier, with a high unemployment rate, which could fuel hiring discrimination.

Societal factors potentially associated with gender discrimination propensities

OECD Index of regulation on individual dismissal of workers with regular contracts. 0 = very loose, 5 = very strict. The index refers to the year 2013 ( OECD, 2020a) .

  Data from the OECD for 2013. Total duration for which mothers can be on paid leave (OECD, 2020 b ).

Includes public spending on early childhood education and care, OECD Family Database for 2015 or latest available year ( OECD, 2020c) .

Data from OECD for 2019 ( OECD, 2019 ).

OECD Short-Term Labor Market Statistics 2017 ( OECD, 2017 ).

Data from the OECD, referring to 2018 ( OECD, 2020d) .

Data from OECD Family Data Base for 2015 or latest available year ( OECD, 2020c) .

h Source : Own calculations. ‘When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women’, per cent (strongly) disagree minus per cent (strongly) agree. Averages based on available data, European Values Survey 2008, 2017, as well as World Value Survey Waves 5 (2005–2009) and 6 (2011–2015).

Numbers provided by Hofstede Insights, comparing countries’ scores on the Masculinity Index (see Hofstede Insights, 2020 ).

The World Economic Forum: The Global Gender Gap Report 2017. Global Gender Gap Index ( The World Economic Forum, 2017 ).

Family policies can potentially influence employers’ hiring decisions by affecting the costs associated with childbirth. Although often considered mutually complementary interventions, public support for childcare (through direct provision or subsidies) and parental leave policies actually have very different implications. Childcare support policies likely reduce the duration of post-birth work interruptions, and, because they are funded through general taxes, their costs are not borne by employers in particular. In contrast, generous maternity leave policies that establish mandatory job retention over a specified period around childbirth impose significant nonwage costs to employers, which will be greater for tasks where interruptions provoke severe human capital depreciation ( Stier, Lewin-Epstein and Braun, 2001 ; Mandel and Semyonov, 2006 ; Gangl and Ziefle, 2009 ). The probability that employers discriminate against women should thus be greater in contexts where maternity leave arrangements are generous, such as Norway, and in contexts with less public provision of childcare, such as the United States (see Table 2 ).

Our countries of study also differ with respect to gender norms, which are associated with labour market and family policies (see Table 2 ). There is a close association between female employment rates and support for gender stereotypes ( Fortin, 2005 ; Polavieja, 2015 ) and we expect more hiring discrimination of women in countries with higher support for traditional gender attitudes, such as Germany. Notably, such norms go beyond mere attitudinal indicators and include sex-typical behaviours that can shape expectations ( Polavieja, 2012 ). Relevant behaviours with a normative dimension include fertility behaviour (e.g. average age at first birth) and gender differences in employment rates and working hours that can ‘inform’ employers about the ‘risks’ of employing women ( Bygren, Erlandsson and Gähler, 2017 ; Becker, Fernandes and Weichselbaumer, 2019 ). The selected countries differ in both gender attitudes and behaviours potentially affecting employers’ hiring decisions.

Table 2 summarizes the indicators that characterize the countries included in the study. The list of indicators is not exhaustive, but the table illustrates the degree of variation across these countries. In accordance with the above theories, we expect the probability of observing gender discrimination in hiring to be higher in macro-level contexts where the costs of job mismatch are high due to labour-market regulation or—conditions and where traditional gender norms prevail, as expressed through attitudes and values or through gendered behaviours. These arguments, based on a small selection of the contextual measures that could have been included, are tentative. Moreover, contextual factors are only relevant if employers know about them or act upon related beliefs. Both assumptions are disputable ( Birkelund et al. , 2019 ). Hence, our aim is not to identify the effect of any single dimension, which would be impossible given the small sample of countries, but to determine if our findings hold across different country contexts, and, in the event they do not, whether we can meaningfully interpret national variation by accounting for these institutional, cultural, and economic dimensions.

From 2016 to 2018, we sent fictitious cover letters and CVs sent to 21,318 vacant jobs advertized on national online platforms, and gathered and coded all responses from the employers (for an overview of the data, see Lancee et al. , 2019a ,b). The experiment was primarily designed to measure hiring discrimination against immigrants and their descendants. 4 To compare their callbacks with those received by the majority population, 25 per cent of the applications in each country included a majority identity, 4,279 in total, which are the data that are used here. The fictitious job applicants, hereafter applicants, were given education levels that matched the (average) job requirements, which varied between a high school diploma to a bachelor’s degree. All applicants had CVs with four years occupation-specific work experience at two different employers, 5 and we varied their age between 22 and 26 years. 6 The design is unmatched, which means that one application was sent to each vacancy. Some field experiments send two—or more—applications per vacancy, allowing the researchers to measure individual employer behaviour in addition to average employer behaviour within occupations and countries, which we measure here. Although both matched and unmatched designs have distinct advantages, the strength of the unmatched design is that one can easily implement multiple treatments. Furthermore, the risk of detection is minimal. There is also evidence that unmatched designs provide the most comparable and externally valid estimates of hiring discrimination, by avoiding potential issues of induced competition (see Vuolo, Uggen and Lageson, 2018 ; Lancee, 2019 ; Larsen, 2020 for discussions) and they minimize harm to employers by reducing their time spent in reading fictitious applications. Applications were sent to nationally advertized job vacancies within each country, which means that, although limited by occupational constraints (six occupations), the study covers national labour markets.

Occupations

The occupations included are as comparable across the six countries as possible. The selected occupations have different levels of customer contact and different educational requirements. We were looking for occupations that were available on job search platforms within each country, and for which there were sufficient numbers of vacant jobs within a time limit of maximum 2 years. To decide which occupations we should chose, we discussed a range of occupational covariates that one might not need to worry about in national studies, but which could be highly relevant in a cross-national design. We decided to exclude jobs in the public sector, which often have their own recruitment organizations. This implies that many female dominated occupations, such as nurses and teachers, are not included in our data, since they are mostly found in the public sector. We also decided to avoid occupations that often rely on informal recruitment of workers. This implies that many male-dominated occupations, such as mechanics or plumbers, are not included in our data, since they seem to rely on informal networks when they recruit new workers. Since we need the same occupations across all countries, we only need one country in which some of these considerations matter, to influence the data collection.

After these market discussions, we carefully considered the comparability of job tasks and content, and we decided to include four occupations with low or middle qualifications (cook, receptionist, store assistant, and payroll clerk), and two occupations which require education up to a bachelor’s degree (software developer and sales representative). Three of these occupations have relatively little customer contact (software developer, payroll clerk, and cook), whereas the other three imply higher customer contact (sales representative, receptionist, and store assistant). The following occupations are included (ISCO codes in parentheses): Cook (512), payroll clerk (2411, 3313, 411, 412), receptionist (422), sales representative (3322), software developer (252), and store assistant (522). These occupations cover approximately 15–20 per cent of the work force within each country.

Many occupations are likely to comprise different sex-typed jobs, and the occupations included here vary in their gender profiles. 7   Supplementary Table S1 provides an overview of the gender distribution in each country within each occupational category based on national statistics the year before the field experiment took place ( Lancee et al. , 2019b ). We note that receptionists and payroll clerks are female dominated, in particular in Netherlands, Norway, and the United States, whereas software developers are clearly male dominated in all countries.

The size of the labour market differs across these countries, and as the data collection took place within a limited time, the availability of job vacancies varied. This implies that in the data, for some countries, some occupations are under-represented. For instance, Norway has a low share of receptionists (4 per cent), whereas Spain has a low share of software developers (6 per cent) and sales representatives (7 per cent). We therefore add occupational controls in all our analyses.

Treatment Variable

Gender, our main treatment variable, randomly assigned the job applications, is coded ‘1’ for females and ‘0’ for males. 8 The experiment also included other treatments (see Lancee et al. , 2019a ). As these treatments are orthogonal to gender, there is no need to control for them.

Dependent Variable: Employer Response

Our main dependent variable is employer callback, which includes an invitation to an interview, an invitation to a pre-interview, and/or a request for more information. In Supplementary Information , we include analyses using only ‘invitation to an interview’, a stricter measurement of callback. As there are cross-national differences in the likelihood that employers ask job applicants for an interview (see Lancee et al. , 2019a ), we prefer the broader definition of callbacks that includes an invitation for a pre-interview and/or a request for more information. A callback rate of 0.49 means that 49 per cent of the applicants received a callback. We also calculate gender ratios, dividing female by male callback rates. A gender ratio above 1 means that male applicants are discriminated, whereas a gender ratio below 1 means that female applicants are discriminated.

Estimation Strategy

To examine cross-country variation in hiring discrimination, we start by documenting callback ratios for each occupation in each country; see Table 3 . We then estimate country-specific linear probability regression models; regressing callbacks on gender (see Supplementary Table S2 and Figure 1 ). 9 The gender coefficient provides an estimate of gender discrimination in hiring within each country, with associated standard error.

Effect of gender on callback probability. Note: Coefficients with 95 per cent confidence intervals from linear probability models estimated for each country, including occupation controls ( Supplementary Table S2 , models 1–6)

Callback ratios by country, occupation, and gender

Table 3 shows the callback rates and related gender ratios by country and occupation. We first note that out of 36 possible outcomes, 23 favour females , as indicated by callback gender ratios > 1. This is interesting, but due to the small sample for each occupation within each country, most of these outcomes are not significant by conventional standards (see right-hand column). In Germany, we find statistically significant hiring discrimination against male applicants for receptionist and store assistant jobs, with callback ratios of 1.4 and 1.9, respectively. In the Netherlands, we find evidence of hiring discrimination against male applicants for store assistant jobs, with a callback ratio of 2.2. In Spain, we find clear evidence of hiring discrimination of males in two occupations, with callback ratios of 1.9 (payroll clerk) and 4.5 (receptionist). In the United Kingdom, we find strong evidence of hiring discrimination against males in payroll clerk jobs (callback ratio of 4.8, the highest of all). Interestingly, in the data, we find no evidence of gender discrimination in hiring in Norway or the United States. Thus, the evidence shows hiring discrimination against male, not female, job applicants in 1–3 occupations within four of the six countries.

Based on country-specific regression models, Figure 1 (and Supplementary Table S2 ) shows the probability of receiving a callback separately for each country. According to these estimates, we find evidence of hiring discrimination against male applicants in United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. The gender differences range from 0 per cent in the US to 9 percentage points in Germany. Thus, we observe gender discrimination in hiring against men in four out of six countries. 10

As shown in Supplementary Table S3 , only one of the contrasts is significant, namely, that between the United States and Germany, the countries with the lowest and highest gender coefficients, respectively. However, given that there are 30 contrasts in this equation, we would expect to observe 1–2 significant outcomes (5 per cent) by chance.

Thus far, the field experiment has revealed that employers discriminate against male but not female applicants. Second, although the gender coefficients are statistically significant in four out of six countries (United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain), we find no convincing evidence of cross-national differences in gender discrimination. 11 Given the widespread evidence of female labour market disadvantage and the large cross-national variation in structural, institutional, and cultural dimensions documented in Table 2 , our finding of no cross-national differences in hiring discrimination is surprising. However, no previous study has examined this topic in a rigorous comparative way.

When using invitation for an interview, a stricter definition of callbacks, as the dependent variable, we find smaller country differences in gender discrimination in hiring (compare Figure 1 with Supplementary Figure S1 ). As the stricter version of callback (invitation for an interview) are less frequent than the wider version, the standard errors for these estimates are slightly larger, which can be seen by comparing Figure 1 with Supplementary Figure S1 . This means that for the interview variable, the 95 per cent confidence intervals are slightly wider, and that it is only for Spain where the estimate is statistically significant.

Despite recent changes, on average, women still have lower earnings and worse career prospects. These well-known facts are true according to reliable and national representative data, such as labour force surveys and register data. The key question is why. Broadly speaking, two explanations have been provided. First, women and men might sort into different jobs because of their different educational and occupational choices, and their different work–life balance preferences and constraints, all of which accumulate to different employment trajectories and outcomes. This is the supply-side story. Second, men and women might sort into different jobs because employers discriminate women, particularly in the best-paid jobs. According to this demand-side explanation, hiring discrimination against women would be an important explanation for women’s labour-market disadvantage. Because studies based on observational data cannot empirically adjudicate between supply and demand side explanations, there is a need for field experiments to provide reliable and valid estimates of employers’ hiring discrimination.

Interestingly, the story jointly told by previous field experiments clashes with the conventional account of female disadvantage. It is often the fictitious male applicants, not the females, who are discriminated in hiring processes. In particular, there is evidence that women are favoured in female-dominated occupations. However, the heterogeneity of previous studies, in terms of occupations included, timing of the studies, and at what geographical level (local or national) they took place, makes comparisons difficult. Against this background, we made use of a harmonized field experiment in six countries to provide comparable, reliable, and balanced cross-national documentation of hiring discrimination against men and women.

The field experimental data show no evidence of hiring discrimination against women in any of the occupations in any of the countries included. The countries vary in a number of institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions potentially affecting employers’ likelihood of discriminating against women. We also included occupations varying in skill requirements and customer contact. And, as documented in footnote 7, the manual job content of our occupations vary from high (cooks) to low (payroll clerks). The findings reported in this study therefore constitute an important and robust piece of evidence that young women are not discriminated in the first phase of the hiring process in any of the occupations studied in any of the countries studied.

Second, we found hiring discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom, where male applicants were less likely to receive a callback when they applied for jobs as store assistants (Germany and the Netherlands), receptionists (Spain and Germany), and payroll clerks (Spain and the United Kingdom). We found no hiring discrimination against men in Norway and in the United States. However, when pooling the data, we found no statistically significant differences across countries, perhaps with the exception of the contrast between Germany and the United States.

Understanding Gender Discrimination

With these findings in mind, how can we better understand gender discrimination in hiring? We did not find any support for the generic belief that women are disadvantaged in hiring processes, as implied both in models of cultural stereotypes and statistical discrimination, where employers are assumed to believe that women are potentially unstable workers, more likely to quit their jobs to attend their families and/or generally less committed to their firms. Gender stereotypes where women are seen as mothers and housewives seem less important in hiring processes today than in the past. According to our findings, these stereotypes seem not to operate at all. We suggest a few tentative interpretations of why this is the case. First, most women today are not primarily homemakers. Second, females are more likely to be hiring agents, in particular in female-dominated occupations, and we cannot rule out the possibility of in-group (same gender) favouritism benefiting female candidates. Third, in female occupations, hiring agents might find women more stable employees than men, who might be more likely to pursue a career, thereby leaving the job they were hired for. We should also remember that the job candidates we constructed are young workers with only 4 years of working experience. This means the presented evidence does not preclude the possibility of discrimination against women in hiring, earnings, or promotion opportunities later in the career.

Interestingly, the evidence on hiring discrimination against men would seem compatible with existing theories about gender stereotypes that were formulated to account for women’s disadvantage. Perspectives emphasizing the sex typing of jobs, gender categorization within work organizations, role congruency, and stereotype contents, all seem relevant for explaining discrimination against men in the matching process. Theoretically, these cultural perspectives are also compatible with the economic model of employers as (limited) rational actors who try to find the best match between job tasks and job applicants. If employers perceive certain jobs as more appropriate for women, male applicants, even if formally qualified, may be devaluated because employers believe that they are poor matches for the sex-typed job tasks. For jobs that are not sex-typed, gender stereotypes do not seem to matter in the matching process.

The above-mentioned theories should lead to symmetrical expectations of hiring discrimination against applicants with the ‘wrong sex’ in sex-typed jobs. Thus, they cannot help us understand why women were not discriminated in the male-dominated occupation we included: software developers, an occupation which requires continuous training and where job disruptions are particularly hazardous for employers. To understand this, we can only speculate. It could be that the IT sector is more tolerant, pioneering a new work–life gender-egalitarian culture ( Faulkner, 2009 , but see Bertogg et al. , 2020 ). Alternatively, given the low proportion of women who enter STEM fields, IT employers might believe female applicants are positively selected in unobserved characteristics. Another possibility is that employers might be nervous that they have implicit or hidden bias against women. As a result, they may overreact and give women advantages in hiring. Whatever the reason is, finding no hiring discrimination against women in IT jobs constitutes an important challenge to both cultural and economic theories of ‘gender’ discrimination.

However surprising, the presented evidence is not at odds with previous research on hiring discrimination. The key to explaining divergent results likely lies in the occupations studied. For balanced studies, including both female- and male-dominated occupations, and gender-neutral occupations, the aggregate outcome would be close to zero gender discrimination in hiring. For more unbalanced studies, like the GEMM study, which includes two clearly female-typed occupations, and only one strongly male-dominated occupation, we might expect an aggregated pattern showing hiring discrimination against men. In principle, the same logic should apply for unbalanced studies including a higher proportion of male dominated occupations, but then we would expect an aggregated pattern of hiring discrimination of females. Yet the findings regarding the male-dominated occupation we included cast doubts on the symmetrical nature of hiring discrimination by gender. Interestingly, when scholars plan to study gender differences in hiring discrimination, we tend to think about discrimination of women, not men, yet previous experiments seem to include more female- than male-dominated occupations. More research including more occupations is needed.

Lack of Cross-National Variation

Despite differences in labour market conditions, family policies, and cultural norms, we found no clear evidence of cross-national variation in hiring discrimination. An explanation might be that the associations of gender stereotypes and jobs, while culturally embedded, are fairly universal across advanced Western economies (but see Supplementary Table S1 for national variations in occupational gender distributions), and hiring agents across these societies are similarly influenced by these views. Given the embeddedness of job-specific gender stereotypes, one might be pessimistic with regard to the possibilities of policy reforms to encourage gender balance. In addition, the implications of our study appear even more serious given that male-dominated occupations related to the industrial society are gradually vanishing. On the other hand, if gender-neutral occupations are growing in size, gender stereotypes will become less important over time. Thus, we have a cultural and a structural argument, and future research would benefit from addressing both arguments.

Naturally, this study has limitations. Field experiments investigate discrimination in the initial stages of the hiring process and do not give information about who gets the jobs, at what wages, and with what career opportunities. Second, the field experiment provides information about the outcomes of job applications for young applicants 22–26 years of age, and we cannot know what the situation would have looked like if we had included older fictitious applicants. Similarly, we have not tested employers’ reactions to applicants with family obligations. It should be noted though, that a Swedish study including older applicants, found no difference in employers’ reactions to mothers and fathers ( Bygren, Erlandsson and Gähler, 2017 ).

Field experiments cannot cover the whole labour market, and the outcomes of these experiments are only representative for the included occupations. The GEMM study includes six occupations, requiring an educational level varying from a high school diploma to a bachelor’s degree. With a limited number of male and female applications within each occupation, we are abstained from analysing in more detail the variation in types of jobs within occupations (e.g. managerial jobs).

We believe that the implications of our findings are important. In particular, we need to update our knowledge of gender discrimination and the belief that women are always the disadvantaged group. This belief might have been correct earlier, but today, at least for the occupations we examined, we found no evidence of hiring discrimination against female job applicants in any of the six countries included. Rather, we observed hiring discrimination against males in female-dominated jobs, whereas female applicants were favoured in female-dominated occupations and not discriminated in the other occupations we included. Future research should explore more in-depth the mechanisms associated with this (reversed) gender gap in hiring discrimination and delineate its boundary conditions.

For information on ‘Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration and Markets’ (GEMM) project, financed by Horizon2020, see http://gemm2020.eu/ .

If employers act upon a perceived group difference in the variance of unobserved expected productivity, field experimental evidence of discrimination may not be very informative ( Heckman and Siegelman, 1993 ). Using the method proposed by Neumark (2012) , Baert (2015) found no evidence of this bias related to gender heterogeneity.

Several concepts have been introduced to differentiate so-called error discrimination ( England, 1994 ) and stereotype-based discrimination ( Bobbitt-Zeher, 2011 ) from the economic-rational model, but the theory of statistical discrimination (albeit with bounded rationality) can easily accommodate the notion of stereotypes affecting employers’ hiring decisions.

See Di Stasio and Larsen (2020) for a study of the combined effects of ethnicity and gender on employers callbacks, based on the GEMM occupations.

To find suitable names for the applicants, an online name search was conducted on the websites of national name registers and the most frequent names in the applicants’ birth year were listed. Names were then carefully chosen to avoid connotations to religion or class. Finally, we used official register data to identify the most common surnames in each country. For the United States, we used census data ( U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 ) to ensure that employers would identify the names as typical white names.

The age used for fictitious job applicants in field experiments of gender discrimination in hiring varies. See Table 1 .

The O*NET dataset (previously called the Dictionary of Occupational Titles) provides very detailed information of the task-content of occupations in the United States. It covers 449 detailed occupations and provides 277 descriptors for each occupation. Using these data, we performed a factor analysis to measure the manual skill content of the jobs. We converted 2,000 US Census occupations into their ISCO-88 four-digit equivalents by means of a crosswalk provided by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Education, University of London. We found that the GEMM occupations vary between having a manual job content score of 0.76 (cooks) to 0.23 (payroll clerks). See also Ortega and Polavieja (2012) .

We would have needed a much larger sample if we were to include more than a binary gender variable.

Due to the well-known problems with logistic regression ( Mood, 2010 ), especially concerning comparisons across samples and interaction effects, we do not present logit models here. The results are generally similar and are available upon request.

Using a narrower definition of callbacks, see Supplementary Information , we find significantly higher callbacks to women (0.07 and 0.06) in Spain and the Netherlands, whereas the gender coefficient, albeit positive in favour of females, is not significant in the other countries.

The constant terms in Supplementary Table S2 indicate the probability of receiving a callback for male applicants. They vary from low (Spain: 0.19) via moderately low in the United Kingdom, Norway, and the United States (with intervals between 0.32 and 0.50), to high in Germany and the Netherlands (0.70–0.74). These cross-national differences in baseline callbacks reflect country-level differences in demand for labour and/or a better fit of the applications.

Supplementary data are available at ESR online.

This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 649255; the Research Council of Norway, grant number 287016; The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), (016.Vidi.185.041). We thank Laura García Llamas and Louis Klobes for valuable research assistance.

Conflict of interest

We are aware of no potential conflict of interest that might raise questions of bias in our work.

Acker J. ( 1990 ). Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: a theory of gendered organizations . Gender & Society , 4 , 139 – 158 .

Google Scholar

Ahmed A. , Granberg M. , Khanna S. ( 2021 ). Gender discrimination in hiring: an experimental reexamination of the Swedish case . Plos One , 16 , 0245513 .

Albert R. , Escot L. , Fernández-Cornejo J. A. ( 2011 ). A field experiment to study sex and age discrimination in the Madrid labour market . International Journal of Human Resource Management , 22 , 351 – 375 .

Arrow K. J.   1972 . Models of job discrimination. In Pascal A. H. (Eds.), Racial Discrimination in Economic Life . New York : Lexington Books , pp. 83 – 102 .

Google Preview

Azmat G. , Petrongolo B. ( 2014 ). Gender and the labor market: what have we learned from field and lab experiments?   Labour Economics , 30 , 32 – 40 .

Baert S. ( 2015 ). Field experimental evidence on gender discrimination in hiring: biased as Heckman and Siegelman predicted? . Economics , 9 , 1 – 11 .

Baert S. , Pauw A.-S. D. , Deschacht N. ( 2016 ). Do employer preferences contribute to sticky floors?   Industrial and Labor Relations Review , 63 , 714 – 736 .

Becker S. O. , Fernandes A. , Weichselbaumer D. ( 2019 ). Discrimination in hiring based on potential and realized fertility: evidence from a large-scale field experiment . Labour Economics , 59 , 139 – 152 .

Berson C.   2012 . Does Competition Induce Hiring Equity? , available from: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00718627/document [accessed 24 September 2021] .

Bertogg A.  et al.  ( 2020 ). Gender discrimination in the hiring of skilled professionals in two male-dominated occupational fields: a factorial survey experiment with real-world vacancies and recruiters in four European countries . Köln Z Soziol   (Suppl 1) 72 , 261 – 289 .

Bielby W. T. , Baron J. N. ( 1986 ). Men and women at work: sex segregation and statistical discrimination . American Journal of Sociology , 91 , 759 – 799 .

Birkelund G. E. ( 2016 ). Rational laziness – when time is limited, supply abundant, and decisions have to be made . Analyse & Kritik. Zeitschrift Für Sozialtheorie , 38 , 203 – 226 .

Birkelund G. E.  et al.  ( 2019 ). Do terrorist attacks affect ethnic discrimination in the labour market? Evidence from two randomized field experiments . British Journal of Sociology , 70 , 241 – 260 .

Blau F. D. , Kahn L. M. ( 2017 ). The gender wage gap: extent, trends, and explanations . Journal of Economic Literature , 55 , 789 – 865 .

Bobbitt-Zeher D. ( 2011 ). Gender discrimination at work: connecting gender stereotypes, institutional policies, and gender composition of workplace . Gender & Society , 25 , 764 – 786 .

Booth A. , Leigh A. ( 2010 ). Do employers discriminate by gender? A field experiment in female-dominated occupations . Economics Letters , 107 , 236 – 238 .

Brandén M. , Bygren M. , Gähler M. ( 2018 ). Can the trailing spouse phenomenon be explained by employer recruitment choices?   Population, Space and Place , 24 , e2141.

Bygren M. , Erlandsson A. , Gähler M. ( 2017 ). Do employers prefer fathers? Evidence from a field experiment testing the gender by parenthood interaction effect on callbacks to job applications . European Sociological Review , 33 , 337 – 348 .

Capéau B.  et al.  ( 2012 ). Two Concepts of Discriminaiton: Inequality of Opportunity versus Unequal Treatment of Equals. ECARES Working Paper No. 2012/58.

Carlsson M. ( 2011 ). Does hiring discrimination cause gender segregation in the Swedish labor market?   Feminist Economics , 17 , 71 – 102 .

Carlsson M. , Eriksson S. ( 2017 ). The Effect of Age and Gender on Labor Demand Evidence from a Field Experiment . Working Paper No. 2017:4. Sweden: Linnaeus University.

Carlsson R.  et al.  ( 2014 ). Testing for Backlash in Hiring: A Field Experiment on Agency, Communion, and Gender . Working paper. Sweden: Linnaeus University.

Castilla E. J. , Benard S. ( 2010 ). The paradox of meritocracy in organizations . Administrative Science Quarterly , 55 , 543 – 676 .

Cejka M. A. , Eagly A. H. ( 1999 ). Gender-stereotypic images of occupations correspond to the sex segregation of employment . Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , 25 , 413 – 423 .

Chang M. L. ( 2004 ). Growing pains: cross-national variation in sex segregation in sixteen developing countries . American Sociological Review , 69 , 114 – 137 .

Charles M. ( 2011 ). A world of difference: international trends in women’s economic status . Annual Review of Sociology , 37 , 355 – 371 .

Correll S. J. , Benard S. , Paik I. ( 2007 ). Getting a job: is there a motherhood penalty?   American Journal of Sociology , 112 , 1297 – 1338 .

Cuddy A. J. C. , Fiske S. T. , Glick P. ( 2008 ). Warmth and competence as universal dimensions of social perception: the stereotype content model and the BIAS map . Advances in Experimental Social Psychology , 40 , 61 – 149 .

Di Stasio V. , Lancee B. ( 2019 ). Understanding why employers discriminate, where and against whom: the potential of cross-national, factorial and multi-group field experiments. Research in Stratification and Mobility , available from: 10.1016/j.rssm.2019.100463

Di Stasio V. , Larsen E. N. ( 2020 ). The racialized and gendered workplace: applying an intersectional lens to a field experiment on hiring discrimination in five European labor markets . Social Psychology Quarterly , 83 , 229 – 250 .

Duguet E.  et al.  ( 2012 ). First order stochastic dominance and the measurement of hiring discriminaiton: a ranking extension of correspondence testing with an application to gender and origin, available from: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00731005/

Duguet E. , Loïc D. and , Petit P. ( 2017 ). Hiring discrimination against women: distinguishing taste based discrimination from statistical discrimination . Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3083957 or 10.2139/ssrn.3083957 .

England P. ( 1994 ). Neoclassical economists’ theories of discrimination. In Burstein P. (Ed.) , Equal Employment Opportunity: Labor Market Discrimination and Public Policy . New York : Aldine De Gruyter , pp. 59 – 70 .

Fang H. , Moro A. ( 2011 ). Theories of statistical discrimination and affirmative action: a survey. In Benhabib J. , Bisin A. , Jackson M. O. (Eds.), Handbook of Social Economics . San Diego : Elsevier , Chapter 5, pp. 133 – 200 .

Faulkner W. ( 2009 ). Doing gender in engineering workplace cultures. I. Observations from the Field . Engineering Studies , 1 , 3 – 18 .

Fernández R. ( 2013 ). Cultural change as learning: the evolution of female labor force participation over a century . American Economic Review , 103 , 472 – 500 .

Fortin N. M. ( 2005 ). Gender role attitudes and the labour-market outcomes of women across OECD countries . Oxford Review of Economic Policy , 21 , 416 – 438 .

Gaddis S. M. (Ed.). ( 2018 ). An introduction to audit studies in the social sciences. In Audit Studies: Behind the Scenes with Theory, Method, and Nuance . Cham : Springer , pp. 3 – 44 .

Gangl M. , Ziefle A. ( 2009 ). Motherhood, labor force behavior and women’s careers: an empirical assessment of the wage penalty for motherhood in Britain, Germany and the United States . Demography , 46 , 341 – 369 .

Glick P. , Fiske S. T. ( 1996 ). The ambivalent sexism inventory: differentiating hostile from benevolent sexism . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 70 , 491 – 512 .

Glick P. , Zion C. , Nelson C. ( 1988 ). What mediates sex discrimination in hiring decisions? . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 55 , 178 .

Goldin C. ( 2014 ). A grand gender convergence: its last chapter . American Economic Review , 104 , 1091 – 1119 .

González M. J. , Cortina C. , Rodríguez J. ( 2019 ). The role of gender stereotypes in hiring: a field experiment . European Sociological Review , 35 , 187 – 204 .

Halper L. R. , Cowgill C. M. , Rios K. ( 2019 ). Gender bias in caregiving professions: the role of perceived warmth . Journal of Applied Social Psychology , 49 , 1 – 14 .

Heckman J. J. , Siegelman P. ( 1993 ). The urban institute audit studies: their methods and findings. In Fix M. , Struyk R. (Eds.), Clear and Convincing Evidence: Measurement of Discrimination in America . Washington, DC : Urban Institute Press .

Hofstede Insights ( 2020 ). Compare Countries , available from: https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/ [accessed 25 June 2020].

Jackson M. ( 2009 ). Disadvantaged through discrimination? The role of employers in social stratification . The British Journal of Sociology , 60 , 669 – 692 .

Jacobsen J. , Khamis M. , Yuksel M. ( 2015 ). Convergence in men’s and women’s life patterns: lifetime work, lifetime earnings, and human capital investment . Research in Labor Economics , 41 , 1 – 33 .

Lancee B. ( 2019 ). Ethnic discrimination in hiring: comparing groups across contexts. Results from a cross-national field experiment . Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies , 47 , 1181 – 1200 .

Lancee B.  et al.  ( 2019a ). The GEMM Study: A Cross-National Harmonized Field Experiment on Labour Market Discrimination: Codebook .http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3398273

Lancee B.  et al.  ( 2019b ). The GEMM Study: A Cross-National Harmonized Field Experiment on Labour Market Discrimination: Technical Report . 10.2139/ssrn.3398191

Larsen E. N. ( 2020 ). Induced competition in matched correspondence tests: conceptual and methodological considerations . Research in Social Stratification and Mobility , 65 , 100475 .

Levanon A. , Grusky D. B. ( 2016 ). The persistence of extreme gender segregation in the twenty-first century . American Journal of Sociology , 22 , 573 – 619 .

Mandel H. , Semyonov M. ( 2006 ). A welfare state paradox: state interventions and women’s employment opportunities in 22 countries . American Journal of Sociology , 111 , 1910 – 1949 .

Mood C. ( 2010 ). Logistic regression: why we cannot do what we think we can do, and what we can do about it . European Sociological Review , 26 , 67 – 82 .

Neumark D. ( 2012 ). Detecting discrimination in audit and correspondence studies . Journal of Human Resources , 47 , 1128 – 1157 .

Neumark D. ( 2018 ). Experimental research on labor market discrimination . Journal of Economic Literature , 56 , 799 – 866 .

Neumark D. , Bank R. J. , Van Nort K. D. ( 1996 ). Sex discrimination in restaurant hiring: an audit study . The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 111 , 915 – 941 .

OECD. ( 2015 ). Education at a Glance 2015 , available from: https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/gender-gap-in-education.htm [accessed 5 January 2020].

OECD. ( 2017 ). Short-Term Labour Market Statistics , available from: https://stats.oecd.org/OECDStat_Metadata/ShowMetadata.ashx?Dataset=STLABOUR&ShowOnWeb=true&Lang=en ) [accessed 24 June 2020].

OECD. ( 2019 ). “Unemployment rate”. OECD Employment Outlook , available from: https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rate.htm

OECD. ( 2020a ). Index of Regulation on Individual Dismissal of Workers with Regular Contracts , available from: https://www1.compareyourcountry.org/employment-protection-legislation/en/0/178/ranking/ [accessed 23 June 2020].

OECD. ( 2020b ). Length of Maternity Leave, Parental Leave and Paid Father-Specific Leave , available from: https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/length-of-maternity-leave-parental-leave-and-paid-father-specific-leave.htm [accessed 25 June 2020].

OECD. ( 2020c ). OECD Family Database , available from: http://www.oecd.org/els/family/database.htm [accessed 25 June 2020].

OECD. ( 2020d ). Exployment: Share of Employed In Part-Time Employment, by Sex and Age Group , available from: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=54746 [accessed 25 June 2020].

Petersen T. , Morgan L. A. ( 1995 ). Separate and unequal: occupation establishment sex-segregation and the gender wage-gap . American Journal of Sociology , 101 , 329 – 365 .

Petersen T. , Saporta I. ( 2004 ). The opportunity structure for discrimination . American Journal of Sociology , 109 , 852 – 901 .

Petit P. ( 2007 ). The effects of age and family constraints on gender hiring discrimination: a field experiment in the French financial sector . Labour Econ , 14 , 371 – 391 .

Pew Research Center. ( 2017 ). In Many Countries at Least Four-in-Ten in the Labor Force are Women , available from: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/07/in-many-countries-at-least-four-in-ten-in-the-labor-force-are-women/ [accessed 25 June 2020].

Phelps E. S. ( 1972 ). The statistical theory of racism and sexism . American Economic Review , 62 , 659 – 661 .

Polavieja J. G. ( 2012 ). Socially embedded investments: explaining gender differences in job-specific skills . American Journal of Sociology , 118 , 592 – 634 .

Polavieja J. G. ( 2015 ). Capturing culture: a new method to estimate exogenous cultural effects using migrant populations . American Sociological Review , 80 , 166 – 191 .

Reskin: Plenum B. F. ( 2000 ). Employment discrimination and its remedies. In Berg I. and Kalleberg A. (Eds.), Handbook on Labor Market Research . New York .

Reskin B. F. , Roos P. A. ( 1990 ). Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Riach P. A. , Rich J. ( 1987 ). Testing for Sexual Discrimination in the Labour Market . Australian Economic Papers , 26 , 165 – 178 .

Riach P. A. , Rich J. ( 2002 ). Field experiments of discrimination in the market place . The Economic Journal , 112 , F480 – F518 .

Riach P. A. , Rich J. ( 2006 ). An experimental investigation of sexual discrimination in hiring in the English labor market . The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy , 6 , available from: http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/advances/vol6/iss2/art1

Rich J. ( 2014 ). What Do Field Experiments of Discrimination in Markets Tell Us? A Meta Analysis of Studies Conducted since 2000 . IZA Discussion Paper No. 8584. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2517887 .

Ridgeway C. L. ( 1997 ). Interaction and the conservation of gender inequality: considering employment . American Sociological Review , 62 , 218 – 235 .

Rivera L. A. , Tilcsik A. ( 2016 ). Class advantage, commitment penalty: the gendered effect of social class signals in an elite labor market . American Sociological Review , 81 , 1097 – 1131 .

Rudman L. , Phelan J. E. ( 2008 ). Backlash effects for disconfirming gender stereotypes in organizations . Research in Organizational Behavior , 28 , 61 – 79 .

Stier H. , Lewin-Epstein N. , Braun M. ( 2001 ). Welfare regimes, family-supportive policies, and women’s employment along the life-course . American Journal of Sociology , 106 , 1731 – 1760 .

The World Economic Forum. ( 2017 ). The Global Gender Gap Report 2017 , available from: https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-gender-gap-report-2017

Torre M. ( 2014 ). The scarring effect of “women’s work”: the determinants of women’s attrition from male-dominated occupations . Social Forces , 93 , 1 – 29 .

Torre M. ( 2018 ). Stopgappers? The occupational trajectories of men in female-dominated occupations . Work and Occupations , 45 , 283 – 312 .

U.S. Census Bureau. ( 2010 ). Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census , available from: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/2010_surnames.html [accessed 18 January 2019].

Vuolo M. , Uggen C. , Lageson S. ( 2018 ). To match or not to match? Statistical and substantive considerations in audit design and analysis. In Gaddis S. M. (Ed.), Audit Studies: Behind the Scenes with Theory, Method, and Nuance . Cham : Springer , pp. 119 – 140 .

Weichselbaumer D. ( 2004 ). Is it sex or personality? The impact of sex stereotypes on discrimination in applicant selection . Eastern Economic Journal , 30 , 159 – 186 .

Weichselbaumer D. , Winter-Ebmer R. ( 2005 ). A meta-analysis of the international gender wage gap . Journal of Economic Surveys , 19 , 479 – 511 .

Williams C. L. , Muller C. , Kilanski K. ( 2012 ). Gendered organizations in the new economy . Gender & Society , 26 , 549 – 573 .

Williams W. M. , Ceci S. J. ( 2015 ). National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track . PNAS , 112 , 5360 – 5365 .

Yavorsky J. E. ( 2019 ). Uneven patterns of inequality: an audit analysis of hiring-related practicies by gendered and classed contexts . Social Forces , 98 , 461 – 492 .

Zhou X. , Zhang J. , Song X. ( 2013 ). Gender Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from 19,130 Resumes in China . MPRA paper No. 43543. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2195840 or 10.2139/ssrn.2195840 .

Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund is a Professor of Sociology at University of Oslo. Her main research interests include analytical sociology, labor market studies, social inequalities, and population dynamics. She is a Fellow at The European Academy of Sociology, and Secretary General at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Her articles have appeared in European Sociological Review, Social Forces, International Migration Review, European Societies, and, earlier, in American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review .

Bram Lancee is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Current research interests include social capital, ethnic minorities and the labour market, inequality, attitudes towards immigration, and ethnic discrimination. His work has been published in journals, such as Social Forces, European Sociological Review, International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Social Science Research.

Edvard N. Larsen is a postdoctoral researcher in Sociology at the University of Oslo, and Researcher II at the KIFO Institute of Church, Religion, and Worldview research. His main research interests are social inequality, migration, labor market discrimination, and religion. His work has been published in the journals Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies , Social Psychology Quarterly , and Research on Social Stratification and Mobility .

Javier Polavieja (Oxford University PhD in Sociology, 2001) is Banco Santander Professor of Sociology and Director of the D-Lab at the Department of Social Sciences, University Carlos III of Madrid, as well as Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics and the Carlos III-Juan March Institute. His main fields of research are social stratification, political sociology, and migration research. His work has been published in American Journal of Sociology , American Sociological Review , European Sociological Review , Social Forces , Socio-Economic Review , Labour Economics , Political Behavior , Electoral Studies , International Migration , and Social Indicators Research .

Jonas Radl is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Head of the Research Group ‘Effort and Social Inequality’ at WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Current research interests comprise social stratification and the life course. His work has been published in journals such as European Sociological Review , Social Forces , and Socio-economic Review .

Ruta Yemane is a Research Fellow at WZB Berlin Social Science Center in the migration, integration, and transnationalization research unit. Her research focuses on labor market discrimination, racism, and stereotypes. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Social Psychology and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies .

Supplementary data

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1468-2672
• Print ISSN 0266-7215
• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Discrimination and Harassment Case Study Analysis

• Post author: Stevens and McMillan Law Firm
• Post published: July 7, 2020
• Post category: Attorney Info

Case studies about discrimination in the workplace

In August of 2018, a young woman was hired to become the shipping manager for a small printing company. She is 26 years old, has a boyfriend that she is living with, and has plans to get married and have children, eventually. The general manager of the company was not included in resume selection, interview process, or the training of the young woman, but did do an initial welcome interview when she was hired. After he had met with her and had some time to get to know her a little bit, he was disgruntled at the human resources manager for hiring someone who would need time off for a wedding and for children sometime in the future. He approached the human resources manager and told her “Next time you decide to hire someone, hire a young able-bodied man so we don’t have to worry about him taking time off for personal reasons”. The tricky part in this scenario is that the general manager did not actually say these things to the female employee but to the female human resources manager. The comments that were said, made the female human resource manager uncomfortable because she too, may have a future situation like the one he is ridiculing the shipping manager for.

            This young woman was discriminated against since she was planning for her future as a wife and a mother. Regardless of her plans, or any female employed by the company, the discrimination took place because she is a woman, and once she decides to have children, she will need to utilize medical leave in order to give birth to her children. The human resources manager also shares in the same scenario, to which the GM has now openly given his criticism. The general manager in this case has decided that she would not be a good fit for the position because she will have weightlifting limitations and will have to take time off work. His comments and actions are sexist because he has already decided that she is not fit for the position for reasons that have not even happened yet.  The comments made by the manager could potentially be a serious liability for the company, and an immediate investigation must be done to determine whether or not legal action should be taken against him. According to a case settlement against the Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. in 2015, The company continued to discriminate between 2006 thru 2014, whereas the company subjected countless women to sexual harassment and/or various forms of sex discrimination . Con Edison was blatantly discriminating against women Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said, “This agreement sends a clear message to employers across New York State: All women, including those working in male-dominated workplaces, are entitled to equal justice under the law.” United States EEOC (Press Release 9-2015). Although this case is an extreme example, it gives a clear understanding of how the behavior of the general manager is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. This case is one of the thousands of different scenarios that continue to happen daily.  

Investigating Discriminatory Actions

            A case like the example shown is a lot easier to investigate because it was extreme discrimination and most of the circumstances were well documented. However, as shown by the amount of time that these women were given disparate treatment, it took many years to finally determine that Con Edison was engaging in illegal actions. The situation that is occurring with the new female shipping manager, as well as the human resources manager, will continually be more difficult to prove sexual discrimination, and senior management will have a difficult time trying to prove the blatant abuse of power by the general manager. According to a recent study, “researchers surveyed about 6,000 U.S. military employees, and in their findings, they showed that reporting incidents of harassment often triggered retaliation. Under such conditions, it’s no wonder that for many of these employees, the most “reasonable” thing to do was to avoid reporting.” (Dessler, G., 2016). At this point, the shipping manager is not aware of the statements made by the GM, but the comments made by him have put the human resources manager in an uncomfortable position, as the comments that were made could potentially be directed at her in the near future as well.

In situations such as this, employers are legally obligated to investigate complaints (harassment, discrimination, retaliation , safety, and ethics) in a timely manner. In addition, any appropriate corrective action is required to be taken by the employer to ensure illegal actions and behaviors cease immediately. (SHRM, 2018). One major problem with this case is that it has yet to happen. The comments made by the general manager have not come into play yet, but if and or when it does, he will have violated the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. This law was put in place in order to protect women’s rights in the workforce. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits sex discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, therefore, “Women affected by a pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions shall be treated the same for all employment-related purposes, including receipt of benefits under fringe benefit programs, as other persons not so affected but similar in their ability or inability to work”. (EEOC, 1978).  

The human resources department has been put in place to ensure that all employees are treated fairly and equally, and to make sure that equal opportunity employment always occurs. The role of human resources management involves documentation of employee grievances, terminations, absences, performance reports, timekeeping of vacation and sick time, and compensation and benefits information. When any type of sexual discrimination or harassment happens, it is typically reported to the HR administration. In this case, however, the HR manager has been indirectly discriminated against, so an outside investigator should be.

Author: Sarah Hendriksen from West Valley City

You Might Also Like

4 Steps that employers have to do to protect employees from sexual harassment

4 Things to Know about Pregnancy Discrimination Law in California

5 Ways Employers Can Discriminate Against Workers

This post has 2 comments.

What is the difference between discrimination and harassment?

Discrimination is when someone treats you differently because of certain characteristics. These characteristics could include race, color and national origin as well as religion.

Harassment is unwelcome behavior and can sometimes be illegal. Harassment can include something said, written, or physical contact. They create a hostile atmosphere and are deliberate in their acts.

Comments are closed.

Cookies on GOV.UK

We use some essential cookies to make this website work.

We’d like to set additional cookies to understand how you use GOV.UK, remember your settings and improve government services.

We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services.

You have accepted additional cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time.

You have rejected additional cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time.

Mr K Hughes v Wilko Ltd: 1600612/2022

Employment Tribunal decision.

Read the full decision in Mr K Hughes v Wilko Ltd: 1600612/2022 - Reserved Judgment .

Updates to this page

Is this page useful.

• Yes this page is useful
• No this page is not useful

Help us improve GOV.UK

Don’t include personal or financial information like your National Insurance number or credit card details.

To help us improve GOV.UK, we’d like to know more about your visit today. Please fill in this survey (opens in a new tab) .

Your browser is ancient! Upgrade to a different browser or install Google Chrome Frame to experience this site.

Career Coaching: A case study in evaluating impact

As the volume of workplace coaching has increased, so too has the research literature on coaching outcomes for both individuals and employing organisations, and how to measure these. However, much of this evidence relates to leadership coaching, coaching for job performance and, to some extent, coaching to improve wellbeing at work.

Much less has been done to help employers articulate the value of career coaching in their workplaces or to establish robust measures of its success. Yet effective evaluation of career coaching is crucial when introducing such interventions or refining existing ones. 

In this paper we explore the evaluation of employer-sponsored career coaching through the lens of one career coaching programme as a case study to shed light on some questions relevant to employers:

• What might be the short-term and longer-term effects of an employer-sponsored career coaching programme?
• How can the results be evidenced?
• What can we share about evaluating career coaching that may be helpful to other employers and career coaching providers?

Overall this case study should help other employers and coaches feel that the evaluation of workplace career coaching is both possible and worth doing. The positive findings should also encourage employers to invest in a sustained way in supporting the career development of their employees. Many feel this is worthwhile, but few have attempted to evidence this.

Publication details

Tagged with

• Career development
• Continuing professional development

You currently have 0 items in your shopping basket

View My Basket

Sign up to our newsletter

Register for tailored emails with our latest research, news, blogs and events on public employment policy or human resources topics.

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information Accept

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.