Antecedents of Ethnic Employment Discrimination in Public Organizations

Abstract

Integrating ethnic and racial minorities into the labor market is one of the grand challenges societies face today. In the public sector, this challenge may be especially important as research on representative bureaucracy shows that representation is associated with positive outcomes. We propose that organizational performance relates to an organization’s likelihood of engaging in employment discrimination. We argue that poor performing organizations tend to be less open to new ideas and that decision makers, in such organizations, are more prone to stereotyping behavior. We conduct a field experiment in which applications were sent to real job vacancies in 72 Danish public schools. We merge these data with administrative data on the schools. The results of Bayesian analyses show that minority applicants generally face discrimination but that they experience a higher callback rate from better performing schools than from poorer performing schools. We discuss implications for research on discrimination and public sector representativeness.