“We Will Let You Know”. Ethnic and Gender Discrimination in the Italian Labour Market

Innovative ways of integration into the labour market of the most vulnerable groups need to be explored with the objective to reduce inequalities and promote social inclusion. To identify barriers for increasing inclusiveness appears crucial for the development of targeted policy interventions. To effectively fight labour market discrimination, it is necessary to understand its driving factors to gain insight into why and when employers discriminate. Using an experimental approach and a participatory action research approach, this study aims to promote social inclusion of vulnerable groups by identifying barriers in the labour market against them. The investigation aims to analyse the extent to which ethnic and gender discrimination affect the access of minority groups in the Italian labour market. We perform a vignette experiment to understand driving factors of discrimination to study how and why discriminatory process takes place to identify suitable theoretical and application-oriented concepts that foster inclusion in the labour market. For each discrimination ground (ethnicity and gender, ages, number of children) we design a specific vignette in which recruiters are asked to judge fictitious hiring decisions on a set of fictitious job candidates. With our experimental design, we have the possibility to ask recruiters their opinion also in terms of whether they would promote the candidate for a career advancement. Furthermore, according to the obtained results, we analyse underlying mechanisms and suggest remedies to overcome the observed discrimination. We use explanatory drivers of the discrimination found to develop strategies aimed at remedying the bias in the labour market. Our goal is to develop innovative policy approaches to promote inclusion and quality employment of the considered groups. The aim is to develop practices that facilitate reduction of employment gaps between vulnerable and mainstream groups, and to identify and compare the usefulness of different options for policies.