It’s no secret that trans people face heightened levels of discrimination when seeking employment. A 2011 report found that the rate of unemployment of trans people was twice that of the cisgender population—which, assuming about a 4 – 5% rate for cis people, likely would have put it at about 8 – 10%. However, that may have been an undercount, as in the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey 18% of respondents stated they were currently unemployed. Another survey by McKinsey and Company found that as much as 30% of the trans population is not in the workforce, indicating that many trans people have simply stopped even trying to find a job.
Regardless of what numbers you use, it’s clear that joblessness is a big problem for the trans community. In addition to unemployment, it is estimated that 40% of trans people are underemployed, and those who do manage to find full-time work still must contend with discrimination in earnings—the Human Rights Campaign estimated that trans men earn 70 cents for every dollar made by cisgender LGB individuals, trans women 60 cents. Of course these disparities only grow worse for intersectional identities such as Black trans people or trans people with disabilities.
A recent study conducted by economics researcher Taryn Eames sheds some light on just how discrimination impacts trans job seekers. In particular, she examined the kinds of discrimination trans women can expect to face when applying to a job. In addition to delivering a lot of bad news, Eames’s paper also offers a couple of bright spots and points to job sectors where trans women may face less discrimination.
Eames decided to run an experiment in which she would respond to real job postings by sending out equally qualified job applications for fictitious cisgender and transgender women. Her two control groups would consist of job applicants whose history and photos made them appear to be cisgender women, while her experimental group consisted of trans women who were outed in various ways by their history and photos.
How did Eames signal that her potential job applicants were trans? She found two ways to do so. In creating her experiment, she first took advantage of the fact that in Germany it is common to submit an Arbeitszeugnis, or employer reference letter, with job applications. It is common for an applicant’s Arbeitszeugnis to be many years old, and it is difficult to receive a replacement Arbeitszeugnis, meaning that trans applicants will often have a deadname listed on their Arbeitszeugnis, while their correct name is listed on the rest of their resume.
Crucially, the presence of the Arbeitszeugnis let Eames inject a male-to-female name change into the histories of her fictitious job applicants, signaling that an applicant was a trans woman.
Another quirk of German labor—that job seekers usually include a current photo with their application—meant that Eames could also test for varying degrees of facial passibility. Using a computer program to generate fake headshots, she then manipulated them with Photoshop to create three types of photos: one in which the trans woman passed as a woman according to cisgender standards; one in which the applicant did not pass, but only by a little; and one in which the applicant was very visibly trans.
These design features let Eames test for two variables: trans women who were outed via name changes and trans women who were outed via photos. Eames also tested for trans women who only did not pass a little, versus trans women who did not pass by a wide margin, and Eames also tested for when the two variables were presented together: that is a male-to-female name change along with a non-passing photo.
The result of Eames’s experiment was quite clear: trans women who do not pass face a substantially more difficult challenge in finding a job. Overall, trans women were 17.1% less likely to be offered an interview than equally qualified cis women. Those whose headshot passed (but who were outed by a name change) were only 13% less likely to get the interview, whereas trans women who both disclosed a name change and did not pass were 28% less likely to get the interview.
Interestingly, Eames reported on two similar surveys conducted in Sweden and England. The Swedes were about equally likely to discriminate as the Germans, but the English trans job candidates were a whopping 67% less likely than their cisgender counterparts to get an interview. Given that the latter study was conducted in 2025, this seemingly is a byproduct of the enormous rise in anti-trans hatred across many parts of British society since 2020.
In her research, Eames noted that many cisgender women have reason to find common cause with their transgender sisters around employment discrimination, as her data suggested that the same phenomenon that penalized trans women with visibly trans photos also penalized cisgender women with masculine features.
One bright point of Eames’s research was that these discrimination effects essentially disappeared in tight job markets, indicating that employers will hire a qualified trans person over an unqualified cis person. Eames suggests that nursing is one such field with endemically tight labor markets, a fact that is true in the United States. With a median salary of $79,500 for nurses who possess a two-year associates degree, trans people would do well to enroll in those nursing programs.
This research conducted by Eames, as well as the UK paper mentioned above by Nick Drydakis, indicates that employers often hold hostile beliefs regarding trans women, and those beliefs translate into discrimination. In a sane world, our government would expend resources to counteract these myths and help trans people get an equal footing.
Unfortunately, in the world we live in our government is doing everything it can to further stigmatize trans people and create even more myths about them. Much work remains to be done to foster a society where trans people can seriously expect to experience something even remotely resembling equality to their cis counterparts.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.
