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There is substantial evidence of discrimination at work across countries and powerful evidence that antidiscrimination laws can make a difference. This study examines the extent of protections from discrimination at work in countries around the world and which groups were best covered.

This study assesses legal protections in hiring, pay, promotions/demotions, terminations and harassment for 13 different groups across 193 countries using a database the authors created based on analysis of labor codes, antidiscrimination legislation, equal opportunity legislation and penal codes. Differences in levels of protection were examined across social groups and areas of work, as well as by country income level using Chi-square tests.

Protection from gender and racial/ethnic discrimination at work was the most common, and protection across migrant status, foreign national origin, sexual orientation and gender identity was among the least. For all groups, discrimination was more often prohibited in hiring than in promotion/demotion. There was inconsistent protection from harassment and retaliation.

Addressing discrimination at work will require a broad range of synergistic approaches including guaranteeing equal legal rights, implementation and enforcement of laws and norm change. This study highlights where legislative progress has been made and where major gaps remain.

This article presents findings from an original database containing the first data on laws to prevent discrimination in the workplace in all 193 countries around the world. The study analyzes legal protections for a wide range of groups and considers a full range of workplace protections.

The inclusion of LGBTQ + persons (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and having other sexual orientations and gender identities) is a crucial step in improving gender diversity in the workplace; however, till date, it remains a significant challenge for human resource management professionals. The current study critically examines this issue of an inclusive workplace for LGBTQ + people through a systematic review of the existing research that has empirically studied their experiences at the workplace. It also examines the resistance and challenges organizations face in LGBTQ + diversity training and provides future research avenues.

For systematically reviewing the literature, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) model has been used. A total of 101 empirical studies have been reviewed.

The result shows that LGBTQ + people encounter multiple negative workplace experiences, including proximal (hiring discrimination and housing discrimination) and distal workplace discrimination (unsafe work climate, microaggressions and harassment). These aversive experiences lead to work stress while also mandating that people manage their sexual identity and style of dressing. This stress, in turn, impacts their work–family outcomes, job satisfaction and decision-making with regard to their careers.

The paper provides a holistic understanding of the aversive workplace experiences encountered by sexual minorities.

A central issue of public policy in relation to employment behaviour, particularly in the United States and Britain since the 1960s, has been the question of how to deal with discrimination against minority groups. The latter may be taken to include women, coloured employees, immigrants, foreign workers, the young and the elderly, but in this paper we concentrate on race and sex discrimination which have tended to receive most attention from both academics and policy‐makers. Further, attention is focused on the USA and Britain, partly because there is more evidence on the workings of equal opportunity legislation in the USA than in any other country, and partly for the reason that developments in Britain appear to mirror those in the USA. Since it is difficult, if not impossible, to isolate the precise extent of discrimination at the macro‐level, on account of variations in personal characteristics and establishment variables, detailed analysis of the operation of local labour markets and individual enterprises and establishments then becomes crucial. Here a feature of recent empirical work has been the emphasis placed on the internal labour market (ILM) and the related concept of the dual labour market (DLM). This is, in fact, highly relevant to equal opportunity legislation not only because it is at the level of the individual organisation or unit of employment that the laws are to be applied but also because, as will be outlined below, the legislation appears to have certain features which are consistent with a dualist interpretation of the operation of the labour market and the emphasis on equality of training and promotion opportunities is most appropriate and significant in the context of a well‐developed internal labour market.

Numerous studies have shown that minority workers are disadvantaged in the labour market due to stereotypes and discrimination. However, published research on résumé screening has overlooked the effects of multiple social categorisations pertaining to candidates' gender, education and origin. This study addresses this gap and examines whether the gender, the level of education and the national origin cues mentioned in the résumé affect the perceived employability of candidates.

This study employs an experimental between-subjects factorial design in that 12 résumés varying in gender, education and national origin were rated by 373 Portuguese working adults.

The results documented a gender premium as women were favoured in interpersonal and job skills but not in job suitability, and an education premium, since higher educated candidates were preferred despite their gender and origin. No meaningful interactions for gender × education × national origin were observed, which suggests that ingroup favouritism and outgroup discrimination in résumé screening can be averted.

The findings endorse a multidimensional view of perceived employability by investigating candidates' skills and job suitability from the viewpoint of the decision-makers, which extends our understanding of résumé-screening discrimination. This is critical to prevent hiring discrimination at an earlier career stage, which can increase youth employment and enhance the integration in the labour market of local minorities such as women, inexperienced workers and second-generation immigrants.

This paper tests whether employers responded particularly negatively to African American job applicants during the deep U.S. recession that began in 2007. Theories of labor queuing and social closure posit that members of privileged groups will act to minimize labor market competition in times of economic turbulence, which could advantage Whites relative to African Americans. Although social closure should be weakest in the less desirable, low-wage job market, it may extend downward during recessions, pushing minority groups further down the labor queue and exacerbating racial inequalities in hiring. We consider two complementary data sources: (1) a field experiment with a randomized block design and (2) the nationally representative NLSY97 sample. Contrary to expectations, both analyses reveal a comparable recession-based decline in job prospects for White and African American male applicants, implying that hiring managers did not adapt new forms of social closure and demonstrating the durability of inequality even in times of structural change. Despite this proportionate drop, however, the recession left African Americans in an extremely disadvantaged position. Whites during the recession obtained favorable responses from employers at rates similar to African Americans prior to the recession. The combination of experimental methods and nationally representative longitudinal data yields strong evidence on how race and recession affect job prospects in the low-wage labor market.

Purpose – Research has shown that employers often disfavor racial minorities − particularly African Americans − even when whites and minorities present comparable resumes when applying for jobs. Extant studies have been hard pressed to distinguish between taste-based discrimination where employers' racial animus is the key motivation for their poor treatment of minorities and variants of statistical discrimination where there is no assumption at all of racial animus on the part of the employer. This chapter proposes a test of these theories by observing whether employers use employee referrals as a “cheap” source of information to help assess applicant quality.Methodology/approach – Unique quantitative data encompassing the entire pool of 987 candidates interviewed by one company in the western United States during a 13-month period are used to test our arguments.Findings – We find that employers in this setting are making use of the cheap information available to them: Consistent with statistical discrimination theory, minority referrals are more likely to receive a job offer than non-referred minority applicants, and are not disfavored relative to referred whites.Originality/value of the chapter – Both statistical and taste-based theories of discrimination propose similar observable outcomes (lower rates of disfavored minority hiring). While different mental processes are being invoked by taste-based and statistical discrimination theories, the theories are extremely difficult to distinguish in terms of observable behaviors. Especially for the purpose of designing legal remedies and labor market policies to ameliorate the disparate treatment of minority groups, differentiating between these theories is a high priority.

The study aimed to assess whether transgender women, who were students at a university in London, England, faced hiring discrimination when seeking employment.

Three comparable university classmates—a cisgender woman, a cisgender man and a transgender woman—studying Engineering applied to the same job openings. Similarly, another set of three university classmates—a cisgender woman, a cisgender man and a transgender woman—studying Social Work applied to the same job openings. The degree of discrimination was quantified by calculating the difference in the number of interview invitations received by each group.

When three comparable university classmates apply for the same job openings, the rate of interview invitations differs based on gender identity. For cisgender women, the invitation rate is 31.3%, while for cisgender men, it stands at 35.1%. However, for transgender women, the rate drops significantly to 10.4%. Additionally, transgender women face further challenges in male-dominated sectors (STEM), where their chance of being invited for a job interview is even lower compared to those in female-dominated sectors, with a reduction of 8.7 percentage points. The study also reveals that firms with written equality policies on gender identity diversity show a 25.7 percentage point increase in invitation rates for transgender women compared to firms without such policies. Furthermore, the research highlights that negative beliefs among job recruiters regarding various aspects of transgender women, including their gender identity status, disclosure, job performance, vocational relationships and turnover, contribute to their exclusion from job interviews. Moreover, for transgender women who do receive interview invitations, these tend to be for lower-paid jobs compared to those received by cisgender women (by 20%) and cisgender men (by 21.3%). This wage sorting into lower-paid vacancies suggests a penalty in terms of lower returns on education, which could drive wage and income differences.

Transgender women received a higher number of job interview invitations when firms had written equality policies on gender identity diversity. This outcome can help policymakers identify actions to reduce the exclusion of transgender people from the labour market.

The study gathers information from job recruiters to quantify the roots of hiring discrimination against transgender women. It also enables an examination of whether workplaces' written equality policies on gender identity diversity are related to transgender women’s invitations to job interviews.

Even more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination toward a number of groups in employment settings in the United States, workplace discrimination remains a persistent problem in organizations. This chapter provides a comprehensive review and analysis of contemporary theory and evidence on the nature, causes, and consequences of discrimination before synthesizing potential methods for its reduction. We note the strengths and weaknesses of this scholarship and highlight meaningful future directions. In so doing, we hope to both inform and inspire organizational and scholarly efforts to understand and eliminate workplace discrimination.

This chapter reviews the historical and political context of immigration to Norway, patterns of ethnic inequality in the labour market, as well as how ethnic discrimination has been legislated, publically debated and studied in the Norwegian context. Drawing on the findings of a multimethod study of discrimination in the Norwegian labour market, combining a field experiment with employer-interviews, the chapter furthermore clarifies the extent of discrimination in ethnic minority applicants’ access to the labour market and discusses what mechanisms influence the level of ethnic discrimination ‘at work’. The field experiment reveals that young Norwegians of Pakistani heritage – the by far largest group among immigrant descendants in the country – face substantial discrimination when applying for work. However, it also demonstrates striking differences in the scope of discrimination between the public and the private sector, as well as across occupational contexts, indicating that discrimination should not be seen as mere reflections of individual bias, ethnic preferences or statistical uncertainty, but rather that such individual-level dispositions are mediated through factors at the organizational level. This conclusion has important implications for our theoretical understanding of why discrimination occurs, as well as for the further development of anti-discrimination measures.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discourse on labour market discrimination by introducing an analytical process model that offers a template for the systematic analysis of discrimination within the process of labour market integration. Its usage and contribution to the field is exemplified by applying the proposed model to the case of ageism in labour market integration.

Five phases and four actors are distinguished that, added together, compose the proposed analytical process model. In the following, the model is used as an analytical framework for a mapping review, aimed at identifying and critically evaluating the vast and extensive literature on ageism in the process of labour market integration.

The paper concludes that ageism occurs in all five phases of the integration process, pinpointing potential areas for policy interventions. Furthermore, the authors conclude that the existing literature on ageism in labour market integration is fragmented, with some elements and/or actors within the process so far having received little attention.

The analytical process model developed in this paper provides the scientific community with a tool to systematise the literature, detect underlying mechanisms and uncover existing research gaps, not only for the case of ageism presented here, but for a vast variety of other –isms. In addition, policy makers, trade unions and employers can use the model to better target and tailor anti-discrimination measures in labour market integration.