Study Finds Employers Discriminate Against They/Them Pronouns
A new study looked at job applicants who included pronouns with their information and found those who used they/them pronouns were discriminated against.
by Mira Lazine
A recent study dug into how discrimination against nonbinary folk manifests. This paper found that, in the realm of employment, nonbinary individuals are much more likely to be rejected from a job simply for disclosing their pronouns.
Discrimination against trans and nonbinary people has been well documented in many facets of life. Transgender people are much more likely to become homeless than cisgender people, are more likely to face intense health disparities that are tied to discrimination, are more likely to face violence from both the general public and from police officers, and face high rates of unemployment and discrimination within the workplace. These risks are multiplied for multiply marginalized people, for example trans people of color and those with a disability
However, although we can see its effects it can be difficult to study the exact ways this discrimination occurs. Most of the info we have comes from studies that compared aggregate statistics from trans people to cis people showing the effects of discrimination on employment, housing, mental health, or other areas of life. Others analyze discrimination through retrospective personal reports from trans people on their experiences, as seen with the recent 2022 US Transgender Survey.
This recent study took a much more rigorous approach. Rather than going for one of the above ways to analyze discrimination, it aimed to demystify how it occurs by sending out randomly generated resumes that displayed the sample person’s pronouns on them, with a particular focus on those who disclosed they/them pronouns. This method is common in economics literature, and has historically been used to gauge discrimination based on the perceived race of names.
The study, written by University of Toronto economics PhD candidate Taryn Eames and entitled ‘Taryn versus Taryn (she/her) versus Taryn (they/them): A Field Experiment on Pronoun Disclosure and Nonbinary Hiring Discrimination,’ gave a particular analysis to the usage of they/them pronouns when displayed on resumes. After sending out both test and control resumes to thousands of job listings across the country, what they found was striking: Applications that used they/them pronouns were more likely to be discriminated against (by about 5.4%) than those presumed cisgender (e.g., using he/him and she/her) and those that didn’t have pronouns on their resume. This is raised to about 11% in areas that lean strongly Republican.
It’s important to note that this study has yet to be peer reviewed. It was published as a pre-print in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), and as such, any conclusions should be taken with immense caution. It would be especially wise to wait until the study has been through peer review before relying on the precise numbers in the pre-print.
However, it is exceedingly common for papers in economics to be published in SSRN before going through the peer review. This is done for a variety of reasons, such as to get early criticism on your paper before it goes through a more formal review process or to get your results out faster.
It’s particularly good to see good faith papers like this continuing to be published because the environment of transgender research has become one where poorly done research is being weaponized to push ideological views. For example, we’ve seen papers that are used to claim trans people have personality disorders using questionable scales and small samples. We’ve also seen a resurgence of articles from the likes of discredited activist Lisa Littman, low quality studies used to fuel speculation in the Cass Review, even a study using statistical tricks to claim puberty blockers lower IQ.
Here, with the caveat that peer review may turn up errors our reporting did not, the methods this paper uses seem to be well regarded in the literature and not misapplied or out of place. If anything, this paper goes above and beyond the standard set for previous ones. For instance, this paper gives a detailed assessment of the process for creating the fake resumes used within the appendix, describing everything from the intricate layout of the resume pages to the randomization process used.
The study also analyzed the specific occupations applied for and characteristics of the rough geographical areas the jobs were posted in. The authors carefully sorted the data so that it could be broken down further by characteristics of the jobs, and to ensure there was no geographical variation in discrimination laws. The political leanings of the geographical areas were also additionally broken down further.
One flaw with the study is not so much something that undermines the conclusions as it is something that might strengthen these findings. Eames assumed that employers reading the ‘she/her’ and ‘he/him’ pronouns would assume the applicants are cisgender - however this might not be the case. It is possible that employers assumed the very act of disclosing pronouns indicated these applicants were trans. This would tend to underestimate the extent of discrimination seen with those who use she/her and he/him pronouns.
There are a few nitpicks one could make. It would have been nice to see exact p-values displayed instead of approximations, and a greater diversity of jobs applied for might allow for better understanding the breadth of issues in hiring discrimination.
It also would’ve been nice to see an additional comparison between company size. The authors discuss why they found evidence of discrimination when another study failed to, and attribute this to the different types of companies applied for, as they have different hiring practices that can prevent its recruiters from seeing the pronouns.
But these issues do not impact the main conclusions, which seems likely, once it passes peer review, to provide solid evidence of discrimination against openly non-binary job applicants. Studies designed in this way can serve as an example of the quality of research we should expect on trans issues. A good baseline might be to see if the authors of studies on issues like “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” have an ax to grind, which often leads researchers to eschew mainstream practices in an effort to force a result that fits their biases. Fortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any ax grinding here.
Mira Lazine is a freelance journalist covering transgender issues, politics, and science. She can be found on Twitter, Mastodon, and BlueSky, @MiraLazine