Discrimination in Singapore job advertisements.

Abstract

Singapore is a culturally rich society. At first glance, diverse racial and nationality groups in this city state seem harmonious. On closer examination, we realise that job market discrimination exists. While there have been many comments and debates about discrimination in the job market, few studies have been done to probe deeper into whether there is an existence of discrimination in Singapore labour market. The aim of this paper is to look at employers’ hiring patterns in advertisements which could imply discrimination. The job-advertisement methodology was chosen because employers in Singapore are not strictly governed by anti-discrimination legislation, Instead, they are only required to adhere to the non-mandatory Tripartite Guidelines, whose basic purpose is to ensure non-discriminatory job advertisements. Thus, employers are not encouraged to specify for certain requirements like gender, race or age. Without such legislations, the Tripartite Guidelines allow employers to ask for certain things such as photographs, language proficiency or state preferences for Singaporean nationality. Given such freely usage of requirements in job advertisements, the adoption of the job-advertisement approach in this study will enable us to detect discrimination at the initial stage of the hiring process. Job advertisements from an online job portal were collected over a span of one week as our sample. In the first model, we assessed the association between specification for both Mandarin and photograph in job advertisements. The intuition behind the first model is that when employers ask for Mandarin, it may be due to business needs where employees are required to liaise with Chinese clientele, or it may simply be employers’ desire to recruit Chinese candidates. In the latter case, there should be evidence that employers are more likely to ask for photograph when they ask for Mandarin to filter out non-Chinese candidates. Our results prove that there is relationship between Mandarin and photograph specification in job advertisements even after taking into account confounders. In the second model, we looked at which job industries have less preference for Singaporeans. The rationale behind this model is to determine whether the non-specification for Singaporeans in the job advertisements is due to the shortage of local labour or lack of foreign talents, or simply because employers do not favour Singaporeans.