TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Sterkens, Philippe
AU  - Dalle, Axana
AU  - Wuyts, Joey
AU  - Pauwels, Ines
AU  - Durinck, Hellen
AU  - Baert, Stijn
        TI  - Homosexuality's Signalling Function in Job Candidate Screening: Why Gay Is (Mostly) OK
        PY  - 2022/May/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 15285
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp15285
        AB  - To explain the mixed findings on hiring discrimination against homosexual applicants, we explore the perceptual drivers behind employers' evaluations of gay men and lesbian women. Therefore, we conduct an extensive vignette experiment among 404 genuine recruiters, for which we test systematically-selected perceptions theoretically associated with homosexual job candidates in earlier studies. We find causal evidence for distinct effects of sexual identities on candidate perceptions and interview probabilities. In particular, interview probabilities are positively (negatively) associated with the perception of lesbian women (gay men) as being more (less) pleasant to work with compared to heterosexual candidates. In addition, interview chances are negatively associated with the perception of gay men and lesbian women as being more outspoken. Furthermore, our data align well with the idea of a concentrated discrimination account, whereby a minority of employers who privately hold negative attitudes towards homosexual individuals are responsible for most instances of hiring discrimination.
        KW  - homosexuality
KW  - signalling
KW  - statistical discrimination
KW  - taste-based discrimination
KW  - hiring experiment
        ER  -