Testing for Discrimination against Lesbians of Different Marital Status: A Field Experiment

• Date: 01 January 2015
• Author: Doris Weichselbaumer
• Published date: 01 January 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12079

Testing for Discrimination against Lesbians of

Different Marital Status: A Field Experiment

*

DORIS WEICHSELBAUMER

In this paper, I conduct a correspondence testing experiment to examine sexual

orientation discrimination against lesbians in Germany. I sent applications from

four fictional female characters in response to job advertisements in Munich and

Berlin: a heterosexual single, a married heterosexual, a single lesbian, and a

lesbian who is in a “same-sex registered partnership.”While single lesbians and

lesbians in a registered partnership are equally discriminated in comparison to the

heterosexual women in the city of Munich, I found no discrimination based on

sexual orientation in Berlin. Furthermore, for a subset of the data we can compare

the effects of a randomized versus a paired testing approach, which suggests that

under certain conditions, due to increased conspicuity, the paired testing approach

may lead to biased results.

Introduction

Over recent decades, substantial advances have been made in some coun-

tries with respect to gay and lesbian rights. In particular, the need to combat

discrimination has been high on the political agenda. For example, in 2000 the

European Union introduced the Employment Equality Directive (2000/78/EC)

that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation in the private and

public sector. Also in the United States, in the absence of a federal law, vari-

ous states and cities have banned employment discrimination of gays and

*The authors’affiliations is: Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria.

Email: doris.weichselbaumer@jku.at.

JEL: C93, J15, J71.

The author would like to thank Serife Bast€

urk, Marlen Ihm, Barbara M€

uhlbacher, Sylvia Sadzinski, and

Sandra Stoll for their excellent research assistance and Lee Badgett, Sigrid Betzelt, Claudia Gather, Monika

Huesmann, Gertraude Krell, Friederike Maier, Alyssa Schneebaum, as well as members of the Harriet Taylor

Mill Institute for Economic and Gender Studies, Berlin, for their invaluable help in setting up the experiment

and/or their helpful advice and comments. The author also greatly benefitted from the comments and sugges-

tions of the editors, two anonymous referees, as well as participants at the workshop “Sexual Orientation

Discrimination in the Labor Market,”Paris, 2012. This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund

(FWF), National Research Network S103, Austrian Center for Labor Economics and the Analysis of the

Welfare State.

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131

lesbians. Weichselbaumer and Winter-Ebmer (2007), for example, have shown

that anti-discrimination laws can indeed better the labor market situation of

disadvantaged groups.

Negative attitudes toward minority groups are often considered the basis for

discrimination. As data show, prejudice toward gays and lesbians has been

decreasing over time. The World Values Survey asks people worldwide

whether they find homosexuality justifiable on a scale from 1 (never) to 10

(always). In Germany, for example, this indicator for acceptance has increased

from a meager 3.5 in 1981 to 6.5 in 2006. Attitudes toward gay men and les-

bians are typically more negative in the United States, but the improvement is

also observable here (with an average of 2.4 in 1982 increasing to 4.6 in

2006). The World Values Survey also asks respondents whom, out of a list of

people, they would not like to have as neighbors. While in 1990 34.8 percent

of Germans still eschewed the idea of homosexuals as neighbors, this number

has decreased to 17.3 percent in 2006. In the United States the corresponding

numbers were 38.5 percent in 1990 and 26 percent in 2006. Despite these

improvements, discrimination based on sexual orientation still persists in many

areas of life, as this paper will show (see Badgett et al. [2007] and Weichsel-

baumer [2013] for reviews).

Advances have been made in some countries with respect to the legal recog-

nition of same-sex partnerships. Countries have introduced same-sex marriage

or variations thereof in the form of civil unions or registered partnerships. In

the United States, same-sex marriage is recognized in some municipalities and

states. In Germany the “registered partnership,”which is available to same-sex

couples only, was introduced in 2001. It affords gay and lesbian couples some,

but not all, rights and responsibilities of marriage. Differences persist in partic-

ular with respect to adoption rights and income taxation. In 2012, the German

ministry of justice drafted a law that should align the rights granted in regis-

tered partnership more closely with those of marriage. However, the law was

considered too controversial to be passed.

While the introduction of same-sex marriage and civil unions can be seen as

a step toward equality, queer theorists—often adopting a feminist critique of

marriage—have been more ambivalent (Ferguson 2007). One concern is that

gay marriage may simply shift social hierarchies, leading to a new differentia-

tion between socially acceptable gay marrieds and queer “Others,”whose life-

styles continue to be despised. In that way, gay marriage can be interpreted as

a disciplining device that pushes queers into normalized lifestyles (Butler

2004). Duggan (2002) has coined the term “homonormativity”to refer to the

fact that in recent decades lesbians and gay men have increasingly adopted

conventional, “homonormative”lifestyles. These are based on marriage, a

monogamous family life, as well as successful careers, and are closely aligned

132 / DORIS WEICHSELBAUMER