Hiring discrimination on the basis of skin colour? A correspondence test in Switzerland

Abstract

With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, thesituation of Black people in many Western countries has comeunder closer scrutiny and ethnic discrimination has been broughtto the forefront. Little is known about hiring discriminationagainst Blacks in many European countries. In a correspondencetest in the Swiss labour market, we sentfictitious pairedapplications by candidates of Swiss (ostensibly White) andCameroonian descent (ostensibly Black) in response to 354adverts for sales assistants and electricians. We report significantdiscrimination against Black job seekers, who must send around30 per cent more applications than White candidates in order tobe invited to a job interview. The level of discrimination issubstantively equivalent to results for applicants with a Kosovo-Albanian name that were included in previous correspondencetests in Switzerland. This suggests that in the Swiss case there ison average no additional penalty for skin colour. Explorations,however, reveal significant differences in discrimination ratesbetween urban and rural settings, opening new avenues forunderstanding why ethnic and racial discrimination vary acrossgeographical contexts