Abstract
Charges of religion-related employment discrimination have doubled in the past decade. Multiple factors are likely contributing to this trend, such as the increased religious diversity of the US population and the increased interest of employees and some employers in bringing religion to work. Using national survey data we examine how the presence of religion in the workplace affects an individual’s perception of religious discrimination and how this effect varies by the religious tradition of the individual. We find that the more an individual reports that religion comes up at work, the more likely it is that the individual will perceive religious discrimination. This effect remains even after taking into account the individual’s own religious tradition, religiosity, and frequency of talking to others about religion. This effect is stronger, however, for Catholics, Mainline Protestants, and for the religiously unaffiliated. In workplaces where religion is said to never come up these groups are among the least likely to perceive religious discrimination. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Evangelical Protestants are more likely to perceive religious discrimination in the workplace even if they say that religion never comes up at work, which makes the effect of exposure to religion in the workplace weaker for these groups. These results show that keeping religion out of the workplace will largely eliminate perceptions of religious discrimination for some groups, but for other groups the perceptions will remain.
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Notes
Other factors they highlight include legal uncertainties surrounding religion in the workplace and the unique nature of religion relative to race, sex, age, and other categories protected from employment discrimination.
Some of the research we will review looked at experienced or actual discrimination, such as through differential interview rates in field experiments. Other research looks at self-reported discrimination that is more akin to perceptions of discrimination. As we will discuss, our own research is more the latter than the former.
The 2003 American Mosaic Project survey (Hartmann et al. 2003) did ask a national sample of respondents more generally, “Have you ever experienced any discrimination because of your religion?” Note that this question is not specifically about workplace discrimination. Hammer et al. (2012) did ask a volunteer sample of self-identified atheists specifically about experiences with being “denied employment, promotion, or educational opportunities because of my Atheism.” Similarly, Cragun et al. (2012) asked a sample of individuals identifying as non-religious in the American Religious Identification Survey whether, “In the past 5 years, have you personally experienced discrimination because of your lack of religious identification or affiliation in any of the following situations: in your workplace.” Both of these latter studies are obviously limited in the population that they represent.
Drydakis (2010) conducted a similar study in Greece and find that religious minorities, particularly Jehovah’s Witnesses, evangelicals, and Pentecostals, were less likely than Greek Orthodox individuals to receive a job interview even when their applications were identical.
It is important to recognize that this is in relation to the average workplace in the United States. There are undoubtedly specific workplaces or even occupations in which the predominant religion amongst employees is Muslim, atheist, or some other non-Christian tradition. It would be valuable for future research to examine such contexts.
The specific question they asked was, “In the past 5 years, have you personally experienced discrimination because of your lack of religious identification or affiliation in any of the following situations: in your workplace.” They did not ask this question of the religious respondents in their sample.
The specific benchmarks are for gender, race and Hispanic ethnicity, education, household income, region, household internet access, and household primary language.
The offered choices included thirteen options, including Just a Christian, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhist, Hindu, Agnostic, and Atheist, in addition to those mentioned in the question wording.
Of course, this assumption is a probabilistic one. There may be examples of individuals who talk to others about religion a great deal outside of work but feel like such talk is inappropriate in the workplace. It is possible that adherence to such a norm might vary by religious tradition, workplace, or other factors. This would be an issue worth examining in future research.
Ideally, we would like to have many more measures of religious expression, such as measures of wearing religious jewelry, clothing, displaying religious symbols or texts, and so forth. Unfortunately, the survey data do not have such measures.
One limitation of these religiosity measures is that they are most applicable to the religious population. For the non-religious it might be ideal to have questions that might serve as similar proxies. These questions might ask about the frequency of visiting certain websites or reading certain books associated with, say, atheism.
Since these religiosity items are clearly going to be correlated with each other, we examined variance inflation factors to assess for potential collinearity problems. None of these inflation factors were above 3.0, which is well below the typical level of concern (Regression with Stata 2016).
As a reader noted, religion coming up at work could be a function of the respondent’s own willingness to talk to others about his or her religion, which we also include a measure of in the analysis. We examined whether these two measures would be too highly correlated to include in the same models. The correlation is .33 (p < .01). While these two measures are related, they do not seem to be prohibitively correlated for the purpose of including both in the analysis.
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Acknowledgements
Research for this article is part of the Religious Understandings of Science Study, funded by the John Templeton Foundation (Grant 38817, Elaine Howard Ecklund, principal investigator).
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Scheitle, C.P., Ecklund, E.H. Examining the Effects of Exposure to Religion in the Workplace on Perceptions of Religious Discrimination. Rev Relig Res 59, 1–20 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-016-0278-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-016-0278-x