Taste-based, statistical or aversive? Exploring recruitment discrimination in the French employment market

Discrimination continues to be an ongoing challenge in the employment market, yet its underlying causes have not been fully established. Current research often fails to empirically test the primary theories—taste-based and statistical discrimination—and typically applies these theories retrospectively to interpret findings. Moreover, aversive discrimination, now recognized as a significant form of modern-day racism and a key development in recruitment discrimination, has been insufficiently studied in scholarly research. This gap has led to widespread academic calls for a more nuanced approach to measuring and understanding discrimination. In response, our study introduces a set of hypotheses related to taste-based, statistical, and aversive discrimination in a field experiment to ascertain the predominant form of unequal treatment. This research is pioneering in the European context, marking the first empirical field investigation into aversive discrimination in a real-world employment scenario. Through correspondence testing, our study evaluates the influence of various contextual factors on ethnic and disability-related discrimination in the French employment market. We incorporate four variables—employment market dynamics, job offer characteristics, salary levels, and the degree of customer and coworker interaction—to distinguish between the mechanisms driving these three forms of discrimination. To achieve this, 5,440 simulated resumes were submitted to French companies for 13 different types of occupation, analyzing employer callback rates for majority and minority group applicants.2 Our findings confirm that discrimination is an ongoing issue within French organizations. We found partial evidence supporting both taste-based and aversive discrimination, but none related to statistical discrimination. The data indicates that candidates with disabilities face greater discrimination in jobs where pay is above market level and in jobs requiring extensive interaction with coworkers or customers. Applicants of foreign background experience both taste-based and aversive discrimination. They face increased discrimination in less competitive job markets, for high-paying positions, and when applications from their group are of comparable lower quality to those from the majority group. These results are examined from legal, social, and managerial perspectives, leading to a set of differentiated recommendations for policy measures and organizational practices.