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Transgender people suffer discrimination in the job market

A study shows how discrimination against transgender applicants varies across
gendered occupations, writes Mark Granberg

Transgender people suffer discrimination in the job market

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   obvious. It was therefore quite surprising to us that no study had
   previously attempted a rigorous experimental test of whether
   transgender applicants face discrimination in the hiring process.
   Previous studies have instead tended to rely on self-report measures
   where transgender people report experiencing relatively high rates of
   discrimination throughout many facets of their everyday life. For
   example, in a recent EU-wide survey 37% of transgender people said that
   they have experienced discrimination when looking for work.

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   needed.

   This, along with the fact that transgender people are a growing
   minority group to whom legal protections were recently extended,
   provided the impetus for us to conduct an experimental test of their
   situation in the hiring process. Generally, our experiment verified the
   experiences of hiring discrimination that transgender people tend to
   report in surveys. We also showed how discrimination against
   transgender applicants varies across gendered occupations. The
   published paper is available here, but in this post I will give a quick
   summary of our results.
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   applications were sent out to real job openings all over Sweden. This
   methodology has been used to study discrimination against numerous
   other groups. For our experiment, transgender identity was randomly
   assigned to about half of the applications and was not stated
   explicitly but implied in the personal letter through the applicant
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   name change was a necessity, as some of their paperwork, should the
   hiring process proceed, would be in the old name. The results showed
   significant differences in the probability for trans- and cis-gender
   applicants to receive positive responses to their applications.

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   applicant in the experiment. As we can see, cisgender applicants
   received a positive response to about 40% of their job applications
   whereas transgender applicants only received positive responses to 34%
   of theirs. These high callback rates at baseline were likely due to our
   focus on relatively low-skill jobs.
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   interesting patterns emerged. In the female-dominated occupations we
   found that women tended to receive a positive response more often than
   men, regardless of whether the men were cis- or transgender. In
   male-dominated occupations we instead found that transgender people
   received fewer callbacks, regardless of whether they were male or
   female. In figure 2 this can be seen graphically through the distance
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   Second, our results show the difficulty in establishing on what grounds
   one has been discriminated against. For example, a transgendered male
   applicant may be discriminated against based on their transgender
   identity in male-dominated occupations and based on being male in
   female-dominated occupations. At least in Sweden, these are two
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   human capital. With such inefficiencies, potential economic gains are
   never realised, resulting in a loss for all of society not to mention
   the transgender people directly

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   Notes:
     * This blog post is based on the author’s paper Hiring Discrimination
       Against Transgender People: Evidence from a Field Experiment, with
       Per A.Andersson and AliAhmed, in Labour Economics, Volume 65,
       August 2020. The paper was presented at the European Economic
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One Comment

    1. The Week In Trans 10/12/20 - Transgender Forum : Transgender Forum
       October 12, 2020 at 5:06 am - Reply
       […] A Swedish study has found that transgender job applicants were
       indeed distinctly less likely to get called back, but the
       transgender applicants did receive about 3/4 of the number of
       callbacks that cisgender applicants got. The results are summarized
       in The London School of Economics and Political Science blog. […]