The Discrimination-Inequality Cycle: Bridging Unequal Treatment and Unequal Outcomes across Countries, Regions and Workplaces

Social science research has made impressive strides in studying discrimination (unequal treatment) and inequality (unequal outcomes), but often examines them separately. DISEQUAL bridges this gap by exploring the mutually reinforcing relations between discrimination and inequality – conceptualized as the Discrimination-Inequality Cycle. The project advances the field through three key objectives: 1) Assessing the relations between discrimination and inequality combining experimental and observational data; 2) Understanding how social-psychological mediators such as attitudes, beliefs and experiences perpetuate the Discrimination-Inequality Cycle; 3) Analyzing the role of policies in shaping and potentially breaking the cycle.DISEQUAL collects and harmonizes high-quality cross-national data encompassing various discrimination categories, with a focus on gender and ethnoracial groups, across multiple spheres of interactions, particularly hiring and rental housing. Using advanced quantitative and meta-analytical techniques, DISEQUAL synthesizes fragmented evidence on discrimination from field experiments and combines it with inequality data assessing their relations across up to 35 countries between 1970 and 2024. The project further integrates experimental sources with large-scale real-life datasets merged at the regional and workplace levels within countries to analyze how social-psychological factors mediate the cyclical relation between discrimination and inequality. DISEQUAL also incorporates field experiments in policy analysis frameworks, systematically comparing the effects of gender and ethnoracial policies. Combining multidisciplinary insights from sociology, economics, political science and social psychology, DISEQUAL aims to deepen our understanding of how discrimination and inequality perpetuate each other and enhance the effectiveness of policies designed to combat these pervasive societal challenges.