Explaining and mitigating hiring discrimination against transgender women: evidence from India

Despite legal and organizational recognition of transgender rights in India, transgender people continue to face exclusion from professional jobs. Prior research suggests that such exclusion is often framed in ostensibly job-relevant terms rather than explicit prejudice. Drawing on the Justification-Suppression Model (JSM), we argued that when overt discrimination is normatively constrained, cisgender hiring managers rely on stereotype-based justifications to rationalize unequal treatment. Integrating the JSM and the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), we proposed that diverse rejection rationales converge on a core evaluative structure: perceptions of low warmth and low competence. Using a between-participants in-basket experimental design with Indian professionals, we examined evaluations of a transgender woman and a cisgender woman applicant for a nursing role. In the no-individuating information condition, the transgender woman applicant received significantly lower hireability ratings than the cisgender woman applicant. When counterstereotypical individuating information indicating high warmth and high competence was provided, this disparity was eliminated. These findings demonstrate that discrimination operates through stereotype-based justifications grounded in warmth and competence and that bias attenuates when the justificatory basis is weakened. The study advances theory by empirically grounding JSM in a transgender woman professional hiring context and specifying low warmth and low competence as a potential justification factor through SCM.