FoDiRa-Project: Seeing your religion

This project researches the experiences of Muslims in comparison to other minorities in the German labor market, paying special attention to the challenges faced by Muslim women. We focus on employers’ decision-making in selecting employees. As a first step, we ask the question whether, and if so to what extent Muslim applicants on the German labor market are discriminated against by companies during this process. We especially try to understand the interplay between the variables gender and religion. Using a factorial survey (vignettes), we present employers with potential job applicants who differ in terms of their gender, age, number of children, country of origin, visa status, work experience and leisure activities. We designed the combination of characteristics in the vignettes to allow us to analyze the role played by the variables gender, religion, and visa status. The factorial survey is part of a general population survey and will also be integrated into the IAB job vacancy survey. Our second module examines whether the latest refugee immigration inflow has had an influence on the attitudes towards services perceived as being offered by Muslims. For this purpose, an innovative web-scraping measurement approach is used, which collects past Google reviews of ethnic businesses (restaurants, shops, supermarkets) locally and analyzes changes over time. Finally, we examine the repercussions of the latest refugee immigration inflow on the career paths of other Muslim men and women. For this module we employ the samples from the IAB-SOEP immigration study and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP refugee survey as well as other data available at the German Institute for Employment Research (IAB). We focus on the evolution of the unemployment rate since the latest refugee immigration inflow and on the question whether in certain sectors older immigrant cohorts are being replaced by a younger immigrant generation.

 

Research questions:

  • Why do some employers hire fewer Muslim men and especially fewer Muslim women?
  • How do new refugee migration flows influence established Muslims, services perceived as being offered by Muslims, as well as the career paths of Muslim men and women?

Scientists involved in the project

Project management

Staff members

Student staff

  • Claudia Martínez Gimeno
  • Alexandra Michels
  • Julia Maria Weiss

Contact

Prof. Dr. Zerrin Salikutluk
Deputy Head of the Department "Labor Market, Migration and Integration" at BIM
zerrin.salikutluk(at)hu-berlin.de