A study by the government’s official statistical agency INSEE paints a gloomy social portrait of a France that is undermined by layers of discrimination. A person's disability, gender, ethnic origins or sexual orientation leaves them at risk of unequal treatment, whether it be at school, in seeking public housing or in the workplace, according to the agency's publication Économie et statistique – 'Economics and Statistics' – in a wide-ranging review of recent studies on the subject. As a result, many claim, French society has become closed and unequal, leaving victims uncomprehending and often angry, fuelling the risk of a potentially dangerous backlash.
It is an issue that has certainly been on the political agenda in recent times. Fighting against discrimination was a central theme of President François Hollande's election campaign in 2012, and during his presidency there have been some legislation to back up his promises, notably laws allowing same-sex marriages and enshrining workplace equality between men and women. But critics suggest the early momentum has since slowed, particularly with respect to people from immigrant backgrounds, for whom no concrete measures have yet been adopted.
In his outline of government policy last week, the new prime minister Manuel Valls did address himself directly to “our youth, those notably from working class areas, [who are] I know, too often victims of discrimination”. Valls continued: “Often these young people would like...to love France and for it to love them. I want to say to all these talented people who think that France has no place for them that France needs them.” However, there was no plan of action announced to back up these words.
When it comes to the workplace in particular the INSEE report highlights clear and current discrimination, especially when using the definition of American economist James Heckman. He says discrimination occurs “when two workers with perfectly identical productive characteristics and which differ only by non-productive characteristics, do not receive the same benefits (access to employment, training, promotions, salary levels, etc..) from a company”. Here Mediapart focuses on three blatant examples of discrimination.
Ethnic origins and hiring
One of the most striking studies in the INSEE report, carried out by Emilia Ene Jones, a researcher at the University of Paris-Est, is devoted to discrimination in the hiring of young people of North African origin in the Paris region. Even if they are better qualified, these job seekers have less chance of getting an interview than candidates whose parents are of French nationality and who have no immigrant background.
The results were produced with the help of a test: identical job applications were created for three made-up employment seekers; all French nationals, they were aged 28, single, with no children, living in the Seine-Saint-Denis département – broadly equivalent to a county – north-east of Paris in similar social and economic areas, each with a driving licence and very similar work experience. Just a couple of factors distinguished the three applicants: two of the young men were given “North African-sounding” names while the third had a name that “evoked French origins”. And one of the two candidates of North African origin was provided with a higher qualification – the technical diploma Brevet de Technicien Supérieur or BTS – while the other two simply had the baccalauréat.
The researchers then used these three fictitious people to apply for jobs; a total of 441 applications were sent to employers offering 147 technical maintenance posts in the Île-de-France region - which includes Paris - between the end of July and the end of August in 2010. The results were clear: the applicant of French origin received more responses than the two of North African origin. The applicant of North African who had the better qualifications had more interview offers than the less qualified North African applicant, but still fared worse than the French candidate even though he was less qualified. The French applicant received one job interview per four applications, the better-qualified applicant of North African origin was offered an interview for each five applications, while the other North African candidate received an interview offer for every seven applications. “When several applicants were called in, it was nearly always the applicant of French origin who was called in first,” notes the study, underlining the “scale” of the discrimination uncovered.
Women bosses
In a study called 'Does a person's salary depend on the sex of their boss?', Olivier Godechot, a researcher at the Sciences-Po university in Paris, the Max-Po centre for research and the comparative sociology research centre the Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC), wanted to find out if woman in senior positions promoted greater pay equality between men and women. He bases his findings on two statistical analyses carried out on data from the annual declarations that firms have to make about the number of staff they employ and their employees' gross salaries, known as Déclarations annuelles de données sociales (DADS). One of these studies was based on a sample of 3,000 employees in both the private and state sector, while the other was carried out on the data of 14,000 staff.
Having first of all noted that in France women's pay is on average 25% lower than men, the author came to the conclusion that the pay gap between men and women is indeed lower when the boss is a woman. But he also discovered that the overall level of salaries is lower in such cases, even when taking into account the fact that it is easier for women to become bosses in less valued jobs where salaries are lower.
Several theories have been put forward to explain why overall pay might be lower under a woman boss. One is that women managers might have less power than their male counterparts and therefore less room for manoeuvre when it comes to pay. Another is that, as their own pay is lower than male equivalents, they try to avoid putting up the pay of their subordinates in order to maintain the pay differential between them and their staff.
The statistics also show how managerial practices vary between men and women; women are seen as helping their staff more and meeting them more often in the form of annual interviews. In addition, the informal 'tu' form of address (as opposed to the formal 'vous') is said to be more common among women bosses, who also pay less attention to “performance” when it comes to pay rises.
Homosexuality and pay
When it comes to sexual orientation, the findings on pay gaps in the workplace are equally damning. However, while many studies on the subject have been carried out in Anglo-Saxon countries and have shown discrimination, there have been very few detailed analyses of the issue in France. Thierry Laurent and Ferhat Mihoubi, from the economic research centre the Centre d’étude des politiques économiques (EPEE) at the Évry Val d’Essonne university south of Paris and the employment research institute Travail, emploi et politiques publiques (TEPP), have sought to remedy this. They used employment details from INSEE for their analysis, and focussed on data on individuals who live with someone of the same sex and whom they describe as a “friend”. (See details of study, in French, here.)
Clearly there are obvious limits in this approach. For one thing this research excludes all gay people who live on their own, while it also includes in the figures anyone who lives with a person of the same sex for reasons other than sexual orientation. Nonetheless, the men identified in the study have salaries that are around 6% lower than exact counterparts who are living as part of a heterosexual couple. More precisely pay is 6% to 7% lower for those working in the private sector.
Yet there is also apparent discrimination when it comes to the public sector too, where the pay gap can be between 5% and 6%. As public pay is determined according to fixed scales, the salary gaps here can perhaps be explained by the presence of a “glass ceiling”, in which discrimination in relation to promotion, grading and changes of grade combine to slow down career development for gay staff.
Nor are qualifications enough to counter this pay imbalance. Indeed, in the private sector the pay gap seems even higher for highly-qualified staff than for less-qualified employees. And the gap grows greater with age, too. However, lesbians are not affected by such pay discrepancies, perhaps because they benefit from a less negative perception in the workplace. The study even suggests that lesbians get slightly higher pay than their heterosexual counterparts, at least in the private sector.
The INSEE approach
The INSEE study in Économie et statistique embraces all of the existing models of analysis of discrimination that have been used, even those deemed to be controversial. These include the indirect statistical approach, which involves comparing statistics for two different groups of populations, and the “experimental” method, in which researchers test the reactions of officials and employers under a set of given circumstances, as seen above. A third approach is the “subjective” analysis, in which researchers seek to evaluate the discrimination felt by the victims.
These different approaches are seen in the INSEE study as complementary and are “currently being re-evaluated conceptually”, according to the introduction written by Éric Delattre, of the ThEMA research centre at the University of Cergy-Pontoise in east France, Noam Leandri, from the equality watchdog the Observatoire des inégalités, Dominique Meurs, lecturer at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense, and researcher in the university research centre EconomiX and associate researcher at the national demographic research institute INED, and Roland Rathelot, from the economics and research centre the Centre de recherches en économie et statistique (CREST).
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter