gender.neutral@work.de: An experimental approach to the discrimination of nonbinary individuals during job applications

For many nonbinary individuals, disclosing their pronouns and preferred forms of address when applying for a job is necessary to avoid being misgendered. The request to be referred to in a gender-neutral way may trigger stereotypes and result in discrimination. Simulating recruitment scenarios, we test the effects of an applicant's request for gender-neutral address and avoidance of pronouns compared to binary-gendered alternatives. We hypothesize that applicants with a gender-neutral request would be discriminated against compared to applicants requesting binary-gendered pronouns. In a pre-registered pre-experiment with a convenience sample (N = 248), we found that applicants with a gender-neutral request were misgendered more often than applicants requesting binary-gendered pronouns and forms of address. No other indicators of discrimination were found, possibly due to the convenience sample. The reviewed experiment tested the hypotheses in a more diverse sample (N = 1275), adding openness towards nonbinary gender (ONBG) as a moderator variable and investigating spontaneous stereotype content. The findings demonstrated that applicants with a gender-neutral request were discriminated against compared to masculine-request applicants during the initial written application stage, with bias being moderated by ONBG. We discuss implications for understanding and reducing discrimination against nonbinary applicants in the work context.