Fishing for discrimination

The use of bogus, unsolicited job applications with the intention of measuring employment discrimination extends across 30 years and six countries. Preferential treatment of male applicants has been detected in Departments of Psychology in U.S. universities. Such investigations have also detected a relative disinclination to hire homosexuals in Ontario law firms, Turkish workers in Germany, older job applicants in the U.S.A., and the disabled in France. Many of these studies dispatched only a single application to employers; consequently they are a test of ‘preferential treatment’, rather than discrimination.