Cyprus firms miss out on talent with anti-gay bias
Openly gay men and lesbians in Cyprus are about 40 percent less likely to secure interviews for jobs they’ve applied for online than heterosexuals, a bigger gap than in other European countries, a UK study shows.
A team led by Economics Professor Nick Drydakis at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge sent out more than 9,000 applications from four fictitious 30-year-olds, two male and two female, for jobs listed on Cypriot online employment sites.
The resumes were identical except for the “interests” section, where one fictitious applicant of each gender listed volunteer work for an environmental charity and the others said they’d worked with the Cypriot Homosexual Association.
Lesbian applicants in the study were invited in to interview for companies that pay 5.8 percent less on average than the firms that offered interviews to the study’s straight female applicants.
That pay gap increased to 9.2 percent for the gay male applicants. Studies in other European countries have also shown discrimination, Drydakis said, though results point to only a 6 percent gap in Sweden and around 25 percent in Greece.
A US study showed a 40 percent discrepancy. [Bloomberg]
