DONDENA Seminar - David Pettinicchio

“Disability-Based Employment Discrimination: Evidence from a Series of Field Experiments”

SPEAKER: David Pettinicchio (University of Toronto)

ABSTRACT:

Various explanations have been offered to account for persistent labour market inequalities among people with disabilities, ranging from merit and personal responsibility, to human capital, to employer attitudes. With a few exceptions, far less direct information is known about how discriminatory attitudes affect disabled job seekers. This talk presents findings from a Canadian audit study of disability labour market outcomes where matched pair résumés were sent to real active jobs in both Toronto and Edmonton. Fake job seekers were matched on all characteristics but where one job seeker signaled disability and the other did not. Résumés were sent in response to ads for both administrative and labourer job vacancies. While overall, there were small differences in the chances of a disabled job seeker receiving a rejection, requests for more information, or an interview compared to similarly situated non-disabled job seekers, the effects were considerably more noticeable among labourer jobs regardless of whether the applicant signalled a physical or cognitive disability. 

BIO:

David Pettinicchio is an associate professor and associate graduate chair of sociology and affiliated faculty in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is currently the Executive Co-Editor of the Canadian Review of Sociology, the flagship journal of the Canadian Sociological Association. In addition to his books Politics of Empowerment (Stanford, 2019) and Sixty Years of Visible Protest in the Disability Rights Struggle (Cambridge, 2024), he also co-edited the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Disability (Oxford, 2022). 

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