Wearing a Muslim veil on a CV has a very negative impact on the chances of being invited to a job interview. In a published study in December, we measured the extent of this penalty using the testing in the case of a learning search by students in BTS Accounting-management. We sent 4,000 spontaneous applications from veiled and non-veiled candidates to a sample of 2,000 Parisian SMEs. Experience confirms a very negative effect which reduces the chances of receiving a favorable response to an application by around 80%.
The study reviews similar work which has been carried out with similar methods in the United States, France and Germany and which reaches comparable conclusions. Its results corroborate the daily experience of tens of thousands of women in France and those of association leaders who participated in the discussion during the public presentation on December 9 at Gustave Eiffel University. They are in line with all the work carried out by sociologists on the situation of Muslim women in France.
However, the observation surprised fellow management teachers who joined forces with defenders of a certain conception of secularism, sometimes described as universalist anti-racism, to sign a virulent column published by L’Express. The signatories do not have statistical skills, have never carried out experimental research and do not contribute to the scientific literature on discrimination but they judge the study to be biased, the sample size insufficient and the testing inoperative. They do not have any legal skills or expertise in recruitment, but they consider the veil to be incongruous and unsuitable for a professional setting since freedom of dress is limited. According to them, the research is poorly constructed, the results non-existent and the media coverage of the study, in which their forum participates, irresponsible.
Religious freedom remains the rule
In such a context, it is appropriate to clearly remind our detractors and readers of L’Express that in the professional field, religious freedom remains the rule. Employees are authorized to wear the veil, kippah or cross in the exercise of their profession. Refusing a candidate because she wears a Muslim veil constitutes legal discrimination. This is an offense which carries heavy penalties. The penal code indicates that the natural person employer risks up to 3 years of imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros while the legal entity risks a fine of up to 225,000 euros. Although there are exceptions in the field of public employment, wearing the hijab is not prohibited in private employment, except when internal regulations explicitly stipulate it. But these rare exceptions do not concern the field of our study which is that of small businesses. Above all, apprentices are vocational training trainees who are not subject to the provisions applicable to employees in the private sector but to rules specific to their status. As the representative of the Defender of Rights recalled during the discussion, any restriction imposed on the freedoms of trainees, in the public as well as in the private sector, must be justified and proportionate. This even applies to training organizations in the public sector.
Regarding religious discrimination, as for any other reason for discrimination, the experimental method of testing, more often called correspondence test in international publications, is today one of the reference methods used by researchers. Our field experiment was carried out according to the rules of the art, it can be reproduced and its results can be verified. We have full confidence in the robustness of these results. Moreover, in many aspects, our measurement protocol is more likely to reduce the effective extent of the penalties associated with the hijab.
It is rare for fellow researchers to attack scientific work with such violence, a fortiori outside their area of expertise and through the media. Over the last five years, we have published 25 studies related to the theme of inequalities and discrimination on a large number of subjects. None of them provoked such a disproportionate reaction. From this point of view, discrimination based on religious sentiment is indeed exceptional. It seems to us that the violence of our detractors illustrates a form of radicalization of public debate, when subjects related to the situation of Muslims in France are discussed. It is clear that the status of researcher in no way preserves this general trend.