Dual Life for Equal Labour? Sexual Orientation Discrimination in the Greek Labour Market

Abstract

By means of a real-life experiment we investigated employment discrimination against low skilled gay men in the Greek private labour market three years after the national adoption of the European anti-discrimination employment legislation. As it first regards occupational access, curriculum vitaes differed only in sexual orientation were faxed to advertised job openings. The estimated probability of gays to receive an interview was by 0.261 lower than that of straights. In addition, exploiting the informal wage offers on the part of tentative employers, a wage discrimination factor was found to be 0.026 for gays. As it comes, a taste and/or statistical discrimination implied against gays. Adjusted for intra-class correlation the estimated differentials were found to be statistically significant (insignificant) for the first (second) measurement. In a process to understand the nature of the discrimination we further found that persons’ sex responsible for applicants’ selection significantly varied; the estimated probability of males to practice occupational access discrimination against gays was by 0.350 higher than that of female. Moreover, males were found to practice insignificant wage discrimination of 0.032 against gays, while female were found to provide gays with an insignificant wage premium of 0.006 on average. The current research contributes to the small academic literature on the economics of discrimination according to sexual orientation in Europe.Field Experiment, Sexual Preference, Hiring Discrimination, Wage Discrimination