Ethnic discrimination in Scandinavia: evidence from a field experiment in women’s amateur soccer

In this paper, we examine ethnic discrimination using sport as a laboratory. Applying a field experiment in the three Scandinavian countries—Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—we test whether foreign female minority groups experience greater rejection rates when seeking inclusion in amateur soccer clubs. Soccer coaches were contacted by e-mail using native and foreign-sounding names from selected groups, requesting to participate in trial practice. Previous findings show persistent discrimination of foreign minority groups in the labour market, and recent work suggests that discrimination also occurs in the context of soccer. Our findings from Scandinavia show that Sweden is the only country that shows statistically significant signs of discriminatory patterns, and the probability of experiencing discrimination increases with cultural distance. However, cultural distance appears to have no influence in Norway and Denmark. We further investigate whether male or female coaches demonstrate different discriminatory behaviour when being contacted, but our analysis shows almost no gender differences. Findings suggest that how men and women differ in their discriminatory behaviour is context specific. The differences identified across nations and previous studies are discussed to better understand the mechanisms of discrimination.