Sexual orientation discrimination in the United Kingdom’s labour market: A field experiment

By Nick Drydakis. Social Science Research Network, 2015

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Deviations from heteronormativity affect labour market dynamics. Hierarchies of sexual orientation can result in job dismissals, wage discrimination and the failure to promote gay and lesbian individuals to top ranks. In this article, I report on a field experiment (144 job-seekers and their correspondence with 5549 firms) that tested the extent to which sexual orientation affects the labour market outcomes of gay and lesbian job-seekers in the United Kingdom. Their minority sexual orientations, as indicated by job-seekers’ participation in gay and lesbian university student unions, negatively affected their workplace prospects. The probability of gay or lesbian applicants receiving an invitation for an interview was 5.0 percent (5.1%) lower than that for heterosexual male or female applicants. In addition, gay men and lesbians received invitations for interviews by firms that paid salaries that were 1.9 percent (1.2%) lower than those paid by firms that invited heterosexual male or female applicants for interviews. In addition, in male- or female-dominated occupations, gay men and lesbians received fewer invitations for interviews than their non-gay and non-lesbian counterparts. Furthermore, gay men and lesbians also received fewer invitations to interview for positions in which masculine or feminine personality traits were highlighted in job applications and at firms that did not provide written equal opportunity standards, suggesting that the level of discrimination depends partly on the personality traits that employers seek and on organization-level hiring policies. I conclude that heteronormative discourse continues to reproduce and negatively affect the labour market prospects of gay men and lesbians.

Subfields: Law, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77b88d1fb24779182b49b4f88aecb5351eaa3f7f

Citations in the corpus

• The relationship between LGBT inclusion and economic development: Macro-level evidence (2019, unknown): “A similar result was found for women in the U.S. identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (Mishel, 2016), for gay men and lesbians in Sweden (Ahmed, Andersson, & Hammarstedt, 2013), and for gay men and lesbians in the U.K. (Drydakis, 2015).”
• Hiring Discrimination: An Overview of (Almost) All Correspondence Experiments Since 2005 (2017, unknown): “LGBT organisation member Cyprus Drydakis (2014) - Germany Weichselbaumer (2015) - Greece Drydakis (2009) - Drydakis (2011) - Drydakis (2012b) - Italy Patacchini et al. (2015) 0 Sweden Ahmed et al. (2013) - Bailey et al. (2013) 0 UK Drydakis (2015) -”