Christian background also negative for job seekers

Christians are discriminated almost as much as Muslims if they are open about religious affiliation in the job application, a new Norwegian dissertation shows.

– It surprises us that Christian backgrounds turn out negative when applying for a job, says Edvard Nergård Larsen, fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Geography (ISS), University of Oslo to Vårt Land.

Together with colleagues, he has sent over 18,000 fictitious job applications to companies in Norway, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany and Spain. Nearly 3,000 applications were addressed to Norwegian employers.

The main finding in the Norwegian part of the survey is that applicants with typical Norwegian names are preferred over applicants with foreign names.

In the resume, all applicants stated that they had worked for an unnamed youth organization. In half of the cases, Kristian and Silje’s organization was described as Christian, while Tariq and Yasmeen’s organization was referred to as Muslim.

In cases where religion was mentioned, the duo with foreign names had only a 10 percent chance of being called in for an interview. But Kristian and Silje also experienced discrimination. Their chance of being summoned was now 20 percent.

“It is almost as bad to be active in a Christian organization as to have a Pakistani-sounding name,” Larsen concludes in an article on the University of Oslo website, where the findings were first presented.

Of the five countries the surveys have been conducted in, only in Norway are Christians discriminated against.

© NTB Scanpix / #Norway Today