The findings challenge a pervasive narrative that problematises Muslims and their faith, providing empirical evidence that comparatively high Muslim unemployment and inactivity rates cannot be explained by their so-called 'sociocultural attitudes'. In doing so, the study lends support to the overwhelming evidence from field experiments that shows anti-Muslim discrimination towards Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim to be a significant barrier to them accessing work.
In the paper, first author Samir Sweida-Metwally analysed 10 years of data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which gathers information on the socio-economic situation and cultural contexts from around 40,000 households. He explained: “I wanted to know if the Muslim penalty, among men and women, really disappears once so-called ‘sociocultural attitudes’ are accounted for, as some have suggested. Specifically, are religiosity, traditionalist views, and lower civic participation associated with a higher risk of unemployment and inactivity?”
The paper found no such association. Another important contribution is that the paper questions the contention that, amongst men, the ethnic penalty is best understood as resulting primarily from two penalties - colour and religion - and suggests that a country-of-origin penalty may also be at play.
The risk of a penalty, particularly in terms of unemployment, was also found to remain considerably high for Black African and Black Caribbean men regardless of whether they practised or identified with a religious faith, providing strong evidence in support of previous research which established that the British labour market is hierarchised based on skin colour.
Paper: ‘Does the Muslim penalty in the British labour market dissipate after accounting for so-called “sociocultural attitudes”?’ by Samir Sweida-Metwally in Ethnic and Racial Studies