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Does the Muslim penalty in the British labour market dissipate after accounting for so-called “sociocultural attitudes”?

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Summary

Using multilevel modelling, this paper investigates ethno-religious penalties in unemployment and inactivity among men and women using the Understanding Society survey. The paper confirms previous findings of a Muslim penalty and a British labour market hierarchized by colour (ethnicity) and religion (culture). However, by including a greater range of ethnic groups the paper provides a corrective to accounts in the sociological literature that being White is not a protection against the Muslim penalty. Rather, while affiliation with the Muslim White British group does not appear to be associated with penalization, Muslim Arabs who traditionally identify as White are found to experience significant disadvantage. This suggests that the Muslim penalty might also be moderated by a person’s country of origin. The paper also finds that considerable penalties remain for Muslims even after adjusting for so-called “sociocultural attitudes”, challenging the assumption that value orientations offer a suitable explanation for the Muslim penalty.

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 45 , p.359 -388

Subjects

Notes

Open Access
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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