Purpose This study examines the existence and extent of disability-based hiring discrimination in China's labour market and investigates how such discrimination varies across hiring decision contexts at the individual, job and organizational levels, including applicants’ gender and educational attainment, job characteristics and firm attributes. Design/methodology/approach This study employs a field experiment approach that uses paired fictitious resumes of disabled and non-disabled applicants. In total, 1,726 job applications were sent to real vacancies in the labour markets of China's first-tier cities. By analyzing employers’ responses, this study assesses whether disabled jobseekers face hiring discrimination and quantifies the extent of such discrimination. Findings Disabled applicants received significantly fewer positive responses than non-disabled applicants, indicating the presence of disability-based hiring discrimination in the Chinese labour market. Notably, discrimination in emerging jobs in the digital economy, such as data annotators and social media community operators, is lower than that in traditional roles, such as telemarketers. Furthermore, analyses of firm characteristics indicate that, within our sample, neither larger firm size nor foreign ownership was associated with significantly lower discrimination, though the latter findings require cautious interpretation due to statistical power limitations. Practical implications The results of our study highlight that job position characteristics significantly affect disability-based hiring discrimination, suggesting that the digital economy may offer improved opportunities for disabled individuals. The lack of correlation between firm size and multinational ownership indicates the need for stronger policy measures and better enforcement mechanisms to promote genuine inclusive employment practices. Originality/value This study is the first experimental investigation of disability-based hiring discrimination in China, uniquely comparing discrimination across traditional and emerging digital economy jobs, as well as across firm sizes, and between domestic and multinational companies.
Liao et al. (Wed,) studied this question.