Gunn Birkelund: Gender discrimination in hiring

Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund, PhD in Sociology is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo (since 1999). Her main publications cover labour marke

Futures: Politics and psychology - how to gain support for climate policies

Combating climate change means implementing policies that will encourage people to act in a more sustainable way. But how can policies be constructed and implemented in a way that is acceptable to the

Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund, PhD in Sociology is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo (since 1999). Her main publications cover labour markeGender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labor market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By conducting the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the US. However, when we pooled the data, we found no significant differences across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.

How to face the challenge of the protest movements? In this presentation Chantal Mouffe will examine the recent Occupy movements in order to grasp the nature of the challenge that they pose to represen

Nature Human Behavior, one of the most influential social science journals, is now publishing a groundbreaking study from a Swedish team of researchers that answers several critical questions on how public opinion changes on moral issues, such as: How come today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals? Why has the public opinion in large parts of the world shifted so rapidly in favor of gay and lesbian rights, but been virtually unchanged on other contested issues such as abortion rights? And is it possible to create a scientific model that can predict public opinion changes on moral issues?

Futures: Climate policies and public support in the US - the way forward

Many agree that some aggressive policy changes need to be put in place when it comes to climate change. Megan Mullin, associate professor of environmental politics at Duke University’s Nicholas School

In order to reach the goals in the Paris Agreement on how to combat climate change, some aggressive policy changes need to be put in place. Apart from creating policies, policy makers also need to gai

Kapitel 3. http://www.russellsage.org/publications/parents-to-children Abstract This chapter analyses the role of cognitive ability, personality traits, and physical characteristics in transmission of so

Venue: Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13 in Stockholm or online Research seminar with Emily Jones, Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. Register here > Abs

European Journal of Political Research 56: 735–756. DOI: 10.1111/1475-6765.12201 Abstract What determines countries’ successful transition to democracy? This article explores the impact of granting civil