Does the Name Still Matter? A Longitudinal Correspondence Study of Hiring Discrimination by Ethnicity and Gender in a Nordic Labour Market.

This article examines changes in labour-market discrimination against second-generation immigrants in Finland over an 8-year period, focusing on five groups. It draws on two large-scale field experiments conducted in 2016 and 2024, in which 10,000 matched applications were sent to 2000 vacancies across five sectors. The findings show a nuanced shift in employer attitudes, reflecting both progress and persistence in discrimination. Discrimination against non-European applicants has declined significantly, while bias towards European-origin candidates shows no improvement. Non-European men have seen a greater reduction in employer reluctance, while male disadvantage among European-origin candidates has remained stable. Despite these improvements, results from both periods highlight enduring structural biases, with immigrant applicants continuing to receive fewer callbacks than their Finnish counterparts. The findings underscore that achieving a fair labour market remains a long-term generational challenge rather than a quick policy fix, and provide support for ethnic hierarchies and social distance thesis, and the subordinate male target hypothesis.