Applying for a Job? Your Age? Your Gender? ...

 A resume correspondence study on the basis of more than 40,000 job applications for four occupations (administrative jobs, sales, security jobs, janitor jobs) found "robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age, but considerably less evidence of age discrimination against men".

For the four occupations combined, callback rates were significantly lower when the applicants were perceived as older, i.e., by 18% for middle-aged workers and about 35% for older workers.

For administrative jobs, the callback rate was 14,4% for applicants aged 29 to 31, 10,3% for those aged 49 to 51 and 7,6% for applicants aged 64 to 66. 

For sales jobs, there was not really a difference between young and middle-aged applicantsn in terms of callback rate. However, the callback rate for older applicants was 30% lower. In addition, there was evidence of stronger age discrimination of female applicants. 

For security jobs too, there were more or less equal callback rates for middle-aged and older applicants. Again, both were lower than the callback rate for younger applicants. 

And, finally, for janitor jobs, the callback rate for older applicants was significantly lower than the rate for middle-aged or younger applicants (Neumark, Burn & Button, 2018).

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- Neumark, D., Burn, I. & Button, P. (2018). Is It Harder For Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment. Journal of Political Economy, 127(2), link
- photograph by Flip Schulke via

The Lavender Scare

The Red Scare, the witch-hunt against Communists during the Cold War, was accompanied by what was later dubbed the Lavender Scare. In 1947, the U.S. Park Police launched the so-called "Sex Perversion Elimination Program" targeting gay men. The following year, an act was passed that facilitated the arrest and punishment of "sexual psychopaths". Homosexuality was seen as a subversive threat, just like Communism. In 1950, Senator McCarty directly linked Communism and homosexuality. In his speech, he claimed to have a list of 205 Communists working at the State Department. McCarthy went into details about some individuals who he branded as "unsafe risks"  Two cases, "Case 14" and "Case 62" concerned homosexuality.  

According to a top intelligence official, so McCarthy, "practically every active Communist is twisted mentally or physically in some way". That included the two cases he had mentioned since homosexuals were susceptible to Communist recruitment due to their "peculiar mental twists". One week later it was reported that 91 homosexual employees of the State Department had been dismissed for the sake of national security. Political rhetoric was more and more characterised by linking "Communists and queers", assumptions about Communists were mirrored beliefs about homosexuals. What they were said to have in common was that both groups were: morally weak, godless, psychologically disturbed, undermining the tranditional family, shadowy figures with secret subcultures. From the 1940s to the 1960s, thousands of gay employees were fired from the federal workforce (via).

In 2023, on the 70th anniversary of the Lavender Scare, the White House published a statement calling the decades-long period of investigation, interrogation and firing of up to 10,000 queer Federal employees one of the darkest chapters in US-American history (via).

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photograph (John Paul Evan's photograph of his own marriage) via

"Early in the morning, there's tolerance and later in the day it disappears." On Stress and Stigma.

Abstract: Stress is a challenge among non-specialist health workers worldwide, particularly in low-resource settings. Understanding and targeting stress is critical for supporting non-specialists and their patients, as stress negatively affects patient care. Further, stigma toward mental health and substance use conditions also impacts patient care. However, there is little information on the intersection of these factors. This sub-analysis aims to explore how substance use and mental health stigma intersect with provider stress and resource constraints to influence the care of people with HIV/TB. 

We conducted semi-structured interviews (N=30) with patients (n=15) and providers (n=15, non-specialist health workers) within a low-resource community in Cape Town, South Africa. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Three key themes were identified: (1) resource constraints negatively affect patient care and contribute to non-specialist stress; (2) in the context of stress, non-specialists are hesitant to work with patients with mental health or substance use concerns, who they view as more demanding and (3) stress contributes to provider stigma, which negatively impacts patient care. Findings highlight the need for multilevel interventions targeting both provider stress and stigma toward people with mental health and substance use concerns, especially within the context of non-specialist-delivered mental health services in low-resource settings. (Hines et al., 2024)

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- Hines, A. C., Rose, A. L., Regenauer, K. S., Brown, I., Johnson, K., Bonumwezi, J., Ndamase, S., Ciya, N., Magidson, J. F. & Myers, B. (2024). "Early in the morning, there's tolerance and lter in the day it disappears" - The intersection of resource scarcity, stress and stigma in mental health and substance use care in South Africa. Cambridge Prisms: Global Mental Health, link

- photograph by Santu Mofokeng via

0.0036%

"Marginalization is strangely ignored in the psychological literature: in preparation for writing this chapter we carried out a search of the psycINFO database for the period from 1876 until the present day, using both 'marginalization' and 'marginalisation'. We found 52 items that included the term in the title - of these, only 17 actually dealt with the experience of social marginalization by people in positions of oppression, exclusion, vulnerability or discrimination: the others dealt with things as diverse as a statistical technique or the marginalization of certain professional groups or practices. Curiously, there was no entry at all from before 1982. 

Over 55,000 references are currently added to the database each year, so in the year 2000, for instance, there were two out of 55,000 or 0.0036 per cent of relevant references. Although there will be many more texts that deal with the question (but do not mention it in the title)., this still looks like a remarkable neglect by the established field of psychology." (Kagan & Burton, 2005)

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- Kagan, C. & Burton, M. H. (2005). Marginalization. In: Community Psychology (293-308), link

- photograph by Leon Levinstein via

Anti-Defamation League Global 100: An Index of Antisemitism

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is an anti-hate organisation that was founded in 1913 as a reaction to antisemitism. Today, its "ultimate goal is a world in which no group or individual suffers from bias, discrimination or hate". In 1964, ADL started a series of public opinion surveys in the U.S. to monitor levels of antisemitism and measure the general acceptance of negative Jewish stereotypes. For this purpose, an index comprising eleven statements (see below) was developed. In 2013 and 2014, interviews were conducted in 101 countries to research attitudes and opinions toward Jews using the eleven statements mentioned before, a study - based on 53.100 total interviews - that is known as "ADL Global 100: An Index of Antisemitism". Respondents who agree with at least six out of eleven statements are considered to harbour antisemitic attitudes (via).

Some highly interesting results (via):

Generally speaking, Muslims are more likely to hold antisemitic views than members of other religions. However, geography has an impact since Muslims in the so-called "Middle East" and North Africa (75% Index Score) show a much higher tendency to harbour antisemitic attitudes than Muslims in Asia (37% Index Score), in Western Europe (29% Index Score), in Eastern Europe (20% Index Score), and Sub-Saharan Africa (18% Index Score). In addition, Muslims living in predominantly Muslim countries who get their information about Jews from the internet (score 73%) are more likely to have antisemitic attitudes than those getting their information from other sources.

Interestingly ... the so-called "Middle Eastern" country with the lowest antisemitism Index Score (56%) is Iran. For comparison: Iraq's score is 92%,  Kuweit's score is 82%, Jordan's score is 81%. For more countries see this map.

Outside the "Middle East" and North Africa, the three countries with the highest scores are Greece (69%), Malaysia (61%), and Armenia (58%); the three countries with the lowest scores are Laos (0.2%), the Philippines (3%), and Sweden (4%).

People in countries with larger Jewish populations are less likely to hold antisemitic views (score 22%) than people living in countries with smaller Jewish populations (score 28%).

Male respondents (score 29%) show a higher tendency to harbour antisemitic views than female respondents (score 24%).

Less than half of the people surveyed under the age of 35 have ever heard of the Holocaust.

Two out of three people have either never heard of the Holocaust or do not want to believe the historical accounts to be accurate.

More than a quarter (26%) harbour antisemitic attitudes - an estimated 1.09 billion adults around the world. At the same time ... 

... 74% of these respondents have never met a Jewish person.

18% believe that the worldwide Jewish population exceed 700 million people while the number is around 13,700,000. Those overestimating the number are more likely to express antisemitic views (score 38%).

The eleven statements (via):

1 Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/the countries they live in] 

2 Jews have too much power in international financial markets 

3 Jews have too much control over global affairs 

4 Jews think they are better than other people 

5 Jews have too much control over the global media 

6 Jews are responsible for most of the world's wars 

7 Jews have too much power in the business world 

8 Jews don't care what happens to anyone but their own kind 

9 People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave 

10 Jews have too much control over the United States government 

11 Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust

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photograph (by Abbas/Magnum Photos, "Iran Diary: 1971-2002", Teheran 1977, "Jaleh (left) who runs one of the most fashionable beauty saloons of the capital, welcomes a client with a kiss under the gaze of Askar, employe for menial jobs") via 

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? By Thomas Nagel (1974)

Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote the essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" in 1974, an essay that makes one think about empathy by posing this very question.

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in (Nagel, 1974:14) one's mouth, that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals, and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet, if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task (ibid:16).

(...) The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise. In our own case we occupy the relevant point of view, but we will have as much difficulty understanding our own experience properly if we approach it from another point of view as we would if we tried to understand the experience of another species without taking up its point of view (ibid:24). (Nagl, 1974)

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- Nagl, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Wie ist es, eine Fledermaus zu sein? Reclam, 6th edition
- photographs of Adam West (Batman, 1966) via and via

What Muslims and Atheists Have in Common

For a study on discrimination based on religious affiliations, researchers sent emails to 45.000 school principals in 33 states in America. What all emails shared was that they pretended being written by a family new to the community. What they differed in was the belief system which was communicated through a faith-oriented quote in the signature: Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or atheist. The basic version asked for a meeting to learn more about the school, a second version looked for a school right for their beliefs, a third one asked about accommodation of religious needs at school, and there was a control email with no religious expression at all.

No response was explicitly negative. However, the lack of responses indicated a clear pattern. About half of emails got a response, those signalling affiliation with Islam or atheism (which was indicated by a quote attributed to the prophet Muhammad or to the atheist Richard Dawkins), however, were ca. 5 percentage points less likely to receive a response compared to the control mails.

Religious bias in response to a routine inquiry from a public school official, amounting to a 5 to 13 percent lower chance of response, reflects substantial evidence of bias.
Steve Pfaff

Mails suggesting that their schools might have to accommodate religious requests from parents led to the following reactions: The probability of a response declined by 13 percentage points for atheists, 9 percentage points for Mulism, 7.8 percentage points for Catholics and 5.5 percentage points for Protestants.

The findings were evidents nationwide, whether an urban or rural, a diverse or homogeneous community, no matter what geography or political ideology (via).

Abstract: Although public administration scholars have long studied discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity, class, and gender, little to no research exists on whether street-level bureaucrats provide differential services based on the religious identity of their constituents. This article reports the results from a large-scale correspondence study of street-level bureaucrats in the American public school system. The authors emailed the principals of a large sample of public schools and asked for a meeting, randomly assigning the religious (non)affiliation of the family. To get at potential causal mechanisms, religious belief intensity was also randomly assigned. The findings show evidence of substantial discrimination against Muslims and atheists on a par with, and sometimes larger than, the racial discrimination found in previous studies. These individuals are substantially less likely to receive a response, with discrimination growing when they signal that their beliefs are more intense. Protestants and Catholics face no discrimination unless they signal that their religious beliefs are intense. (Pfaff et al., 2020, literally)

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- Pfaff, S., Crabtree, C., Kern, H. L. & Holbein, J. B. (2020). Do Street-Level Bureaucrats Discriminate Based on Religion? A Large-Scale Corespondence Experiment among American Public School Principals. Wiley Online Library.
- photograph "God Inc." by Carl De Keyzer (Daytona Beach, 1990, Magnum Photos) via

Vienna - City of Human Rights. Declaration.

"The City of Vienna pledges to act as a guardian and defender of human rights by striving to respect, protect, fulfil and be accountable for human rights in all of its areas of competence. Based on this approach, the City of Vienna actively supports its citizens in asserting and upholding their human rights by providing adequate framework conditions and using them as a basis for its actions. This approach is based on the principle that every person living in the city has the same human rights – regardless of their nationality or residency status." (via/more)

photograph of Thomas Bernhard in Vienna, 1970 via

Mr Chomsky, how does one become an activist?

"The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. We all want to give more than to receive. We all want to live in a world where solidarity and companionship are more important values than individualism and selfishness. We all want to share beautiful things; experience joy, laughter, love; and experiment, together."

Noam Chomsky

photograph of Noam Chomsky via

The Stop AAPI Hate Report

Stop AAPI Hate (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) received 3.795 reports from March 2020 to February 2021. The types of discrimination reported are verbal harassment (68.1%), shunning (20.5%), physical assault (11.1%), civil rights violations like e.g. workplace discrimination (8.5%), and online harassment (6.8%).

More findings of interest: Women report hate incidents 2.3 times more often than men, Chinese are the largest group to report experiencing hate, and businesses (35.4%) are the main site of discrimination, followed by public streets (25.3%), and public parks (9.8%) (Jeung et al., 2021).

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- Jeung, R., Yellow Horse, A., Popovic, T. & Lim, R. (2021). Stop AAPI Hate National Report, link
- photograph by Dorothea Lange via

One day...

"One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings."
Franklin A. Thomas

photograph via

Age + Poor Eyesight = Discrimination

According to a study of  7.677 adults aged fifty and over, those with poor vision report significantly more discrimination, i.e. they are 40% more likely to report being discriminated against (e.g. treated with less respect or courtesy, receive poorer service than other people in restaurants and stores, people act as if they think they are not clever) compared to adults who class their eyesight as good. Those experiencing discrimination, again, show a clear tendency to be depressed or feel lonely, and are more likely to report a lower quality of life and life satisfaction (Jackson et al., 2019).

"People with poor eyesight are at increased risk of loneliness and depression. Our results suggest that discrimination may be an important contributor to this. In addition to addressing the injustice of unfair treatment, tackling the issue of discrimination against people with poor vision could also have substantial benefits for their mental health and wellbeing."

Sarah Jackson

"Teaching coping strategies may help older people with poor vision mitigate the risks for mental health associated with discrimination. More importantly, there is a need for efforts to tackle the negative attitudes and discriminatory behavior toward people with visual impairment in society to reduce their exposure to these damaging experiences."

Sarah Jackson

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- Jackson, S. E., Hackett, R. A. & Pardhan, S. (2019). Association of Perceived Discrimination With Emotional Well-being in Older Adults With Visual Impairment. JAMA Ophtalmology, link
- photograph (Environment Transformer/Flyhead, 1968, by Haus-Rucker-Co) via

The Weathering Hypothesis

"When Arline Geronimus was a student at Princeton University in the late 1970s, she worked a part-time job at a school for pregnant teenagers in Trenton, N.J. She quickly noticed that the teenagers at that part-time job were suffering from chronic health conditions that her whiter, better-off Princeton classmates rarely experienced. Geronimus began to wonder: how much of the health problems that the young mothers in Trenton experienced were caused by the stresses of their environment?
It was later, during her graduate studies, that Geronimus came up with the term weathering — a metaphor, she thought, for what she saw happening to their bodies. She meant for weathering to evoke a sense of erosion by constant stress. But also, importantly, the ways that marginalized people and their communities coped with the drumbeat of big and small stressors that marked their lives." (via)



"There have been folk notions and laypeople have thought that health differences between populations — such as black versus white in the U.S. — were somehow related to differences in our DNA, that we were, in a sense, molecularly programmed to have this disease or that disease. But instead, social and environmental factors, can through what's called DNA methylation, which occurs — I don't know how technical you want to get — but that occurs when a group of molecules attach methyl groups to specific areas of a gene's promoter region, and either prevent the reading of certain genes and sort of forms the gene's product, and you have genetic expression of that gene. That's a pretty powerful idea, and it sort of refutes the kind of more DNA-centric one, that you are destined by the literal DNA you have to have certain diseases or not.
But what I've seen over the years of my research and lifetime is that the stressors that impact people of color are chronic and repeated through their whole life course, and in fact may even be at their height in the young adult-through-middle-adult ages rather than in early life. And that increases a general health vulnerability — which is what weathering is."
Arline Geronimus

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photograph (HD-1469 (Pineapple), 1969, The Estate of J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere/Victoria and Albert Museum) via

Angela

"I'm someone who is very supportive of us eliminating all discrimination."

Angela Merkel

Herlinde Koelbl has been photographing Angela Merkel since 1991. Koelbl says that photographing her has always been "a bit awkward but you could feel her strength at the beginning." (via)

A Child's Birthright

"The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day. One-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is seven years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much."
John F. Kennedy, 11 June 1963



photograph (Kennedy, Indiana, 1968) by Burt Glinn via

Looking in from the outside

“When I sit down to have a chat with new people, I still think: ‘Am I going to tell them I’m a Traveller?’ You don’t have to say it, but why should you hide it? They say: ‘Are you Irish?’ I say: ‘I’m an Irish Traveller.’ Some people are quite shocked; they look at me and say: ‘I would never know.’ It is a bit hurtful because I think: ‘But what was there to never know? What has changed in their aspect when I said that? Are they looking down on me now?’ There is still that stigma about Travellers. We work in London, we vote and we are a part of the London community, but it seems like we are always looking in from the outside.”
Mena Mongan



photograph (by Perry Ogden) of Paddy and Liam Doran, Irish Travellers via

Hispanics. Better Have a Lighter Skin Tone.

According to a survey carried out by the Pew Research Center in the United States last year, 58% of Hispanic adults report having experienced discrimination because of their ethnicity. Experiences, however, vary by skin tone: 50% of Hispanics with lighter skin colours versus 64% of Hispanics with darker skin colours. The differences even hold after controlling variables such as gender, age, education and country of birth (U.S. vs abroad).



More Hispanics with darker skin tone (55%) than with lighter skin tone (36%) say that people tend to react as if they were not smart and are more often subject to slurs or jokes (53% vs 34%) (via).

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photograph of Benicio del Toro via

Quoting Elias Canetti

"There is nothing more base than a certain loathing for the oppressed that goes to great lengths to justify their downtrodden state by pointing to their shortcomings. Not even great and lofty philosophers are entirely free of this failing."
Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations



photograph via

White vs Black Offender + Length of Prison Sentence

According to an analysis of cases in which offenders were sentenced in the U.S. between 2011 and 2016, 1) black male offenders received sentences that were on average 19.1% longer than White male offenders sentenced for similar reasons, 2) black male offenders were 21.2% less likely to receive a non-government sponsored downward departure or variance and in case they did, their sentences were 16.8% longer than white male offenders' departure or variance, 3) in case of violence in an offender's criminal history black male offenders received sentences which were on average 20.4% longer than those of similar white male offenders, 4) female offenders received shorter sentences than white male offenders no matter what ethnicity (United State Sentencing Commission, 2017).



photograph by Vivian Maier via

Ageism and Health

Adults aged 50 plus (n=7731) living in England were interviewed and asked to complete questionnaires in order to analyse cross-sectional associations between ageism and health. Compared to persons who did not perceive age discrimination, those who did were more like to report poor health, to have coronary heart disease, chronic lung disease, arthritis, long-standing illness, and depressive symptoms (Jackson et al, 2019).



- Jackson, S. E., Hackett, R. A. & Steptoe, A. (2019). Associations between age discrimination and health and wellbeing: cross-sectional and prospective analysis of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. The Lancet, link
- photograph by Vivian Maier (Miami Beach, 1963) via