Discrimination against the marginalised is nothing new in our society. And as women, we all have had experiences where we have been underestimated or not been given equal opportunities. And if you are a woman that belongs to a marginalised community, then this is something that might be harder for you. A recent study has just asserted that Muslim women are discriminated against when being hired for entry-level jobs.
According to a Ledby Foundation study, Muslim women face severe discrimination in entry-level jobs across industries, even when they are equally qualified and competent. The Ledby Foundation, founded in 2019 by Dr. Ruha Shadab, is a professional leadership accelerator for Muslim women with the goal of increasing their presence in the country’s workforce. The paper, Hiring Bias: Employment for Muslim Women at Entry-Level Roles, was released in June in partnership with the Maulana Azad National Urdu University’s Centre for Development of Policy and Practice.
The report was written by Dr Ruha Shadab, Vanshika Sharan, and Deepanjali Lahiri. Dr Ruha Shada said that they began their study after hearing numerous anecdotes regarding the problems and prejudice that Muslims and Muslim women encounter in society, including employment. She added that employment was important to them because not selecting people based on hidden and explicit biases is a huge waste of Indian talent. Dr Shadab said that they wanted to be able to present hard facts to persons in positions of power to prove that these anecdotes are statically important in numbers and that remedial action is required.
Over the course of ten months, 2,000 job applications were submitted in response to 1,000 job advertisements on sites such as LinkedIn and Naukri.com. Habiba Ali and Priyanka Sharma, both equally qualified, were created to accommodate the market norms for entry-level professions. The profiles lacked a photograph.
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According to the article, while Habiba received only 103 positive responses, Priyanka received 203, nearly double what the Muslim woman’s profile received. Based on the responses, the net discrimination rate was 47.1%, which was evident across industries. The study found that the net discrimination rate for Indian Muslim women compared to Hindu women, therefore, becomes 47.1%, reflecting a substantial disparity between call-backs for Muslim and Hindu women and demonstrating that a considerable hiring prejudice favouring Hindu women exists across industries.
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It was also noted that recruiters were more welcoming to the Hindu profile (applicant), with 41.3% connecting on phone calls with Priyanka and only 12.6% connecting with Habiba. Furthermore, the survey discovered that North India had a lower discriminating rate of 40% compared to West and South India, where the figures were 59% and 60%, respectively.