Unpacking Racial Discrimination: The Role of Phenotype

Despite decades of research on racial discrimination, the drivers of the process are still poorly understood. One simple but bearing question is whether discriminating agents react to applicants’ phenotypic features in and of themselves, or else take these features as signals of something else (typically applicants’ cultural and/or socio-economic background). Causally identifying the role of phenotype as an independent trigger of discrimination is a challenging task because 1) in many countries (including Anglo countries) résumés are not allowed to include applicant’s photograph, so the role of phenotype simply cannot be tested in many countries; and 2) because individuals’ phenotype is intrinsically confounded with their ethno-cultural background posing a huge identification challenge everywhere. In this presentation, I will (1) review the GEMM discrimination study (Polavieja et al. 2023), which is the first large-scale comparative field experiment on phenotypic discrimination in hiring conducted in the literature to date; (2) present the results of the ADOPT-ID study, an innovative field-experiment that uses (fictitious) internationally-adopted children as job applicants to circumvent the ethnicity-phenotype confounding problem; and (3) compare estimates across these two harmonised studies for the Spanish case, which allows us to “de-couple” the effect  of  phenotype and ethnicity as separate triggers of discrimination in real-world hiring practices and to better understand their combined effects.

You can join the public lecture via this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83771894553?pwd=3niRhNP9fCkoFllEbzgrnVFB8HyPMU.1