"‘HOW MANY CVs still go straight into the bin because of the applicant’s name or address,” asked France’s then president Jacques Chirac in his first national address after rioting broke out in predominantly immigrant suburbs in November 2005. He was referring to a series of studies which found that job applicants with a traditional French surname or a more desirable address were up to five times more likely to be called for a job interview than a prospective employee with an Arab or African-sounding name or an address in the banlieues.
As Mr Chirac acknowledged, the crisis was not simply a breakdown of law and order but a sign of deep-rooted social ills, starting with the “poison of discrimination” that was undermining France’s republican ideals.
Discrimination is notoriously difficult to measure. We know that immigrants in Ireland are more likely to be unemployed, that they tend to work below their qualification level and that they are much more likely to report work-related discrimination. But self-reported or inferred discrimination is prone to error, and previous studies could not determine the extent to which newcomers fared worse because of discrimination as against other factors, such as language skills.
But a report published last week by the Economic and Social Research Institute provides compelling evidence that discrimination plays an important role. For their experiment, researchers sent pairs of matched CVs in response to 240 job adverts in three sectors. In each case the two fictitious applicants had equivalent qualifications, skills and expertise – all gained in Ireland – but while one candidate had an Irish name, the other was Asian, African or German. The result was that job applicants with typical Irish names were twice as likely to be called for interview as those with minority names – an odds ratio that was high, though not unprecedented, by international standards. A Wolfgang Schröder – or a Constance Markiewicz – has only half the chance of a Patrick Murphy of getting an interview.
A striking feature was that, unlike in many other countries, the odds of being called to interview are very similar for applicants with African, Asian and German names. The ESRI interpreted this as a positive desire among employers to hire Irish people as opposed to a dislike of hiring foreign workers. Whatever the explanation, the similar discrimination rates are at odds with previous research which found that black respondents stood out as being more disadvantaged than others. If bias at the initial recruitment stage is not a major determinant of black immigrants’ performance across the labour market, then policymakers must establish what lies behind the discrepancy. For example, how much do the prolonged periods of inactivity faced by asylum applicants damage their future chances?
More broadly, the study demonstrates the urgent need for new thinking and provides a timely corrective to suggestions that the agenda of bodies such as the Equality Authority has been fulfilled. The Government must confront this problem before it becomes irretrievably entrenched.