Competition between Gender and Racial Discriminations. The Reason of the Understatement of Gender Discriminations in Quantitative Surveys?

Maud Lesné, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

Discriminations remain difficult to measure in quantitative surveys. Particularly elusive, gender discriminations are almost invisible. Therefore their registration doesn’t show the high levels of inequality between men and women that remains nowadays. The rates of gender discriminations in a recent French survey illustrate this understatement. Only 3.5% of women respondents report experiencing gender discrimination during the past 5 years. The aim of this paper is to study gender discrimination statement considering an intersectional approach combining gender and race. This approach will allow us to untangle gender and racial discrimination statements and to evaluate the potential competition between them. We will see that the low reporting of gender discrimination can’t only be explained by a competition effect with racial discrimination. We observe an emerging trend of multiple discrimination reporting. In order to understand the understatement of gender discrimination, alternate hypotheses must be explored.