Everything else on this site is one person's account. This page is not. These are controlled studies, run by universities and public bodies, on people who are not me. I am putting them here because for eleven years I assumed the problem was me, and the data says otherwise.
Jobs: identical CVs, different names
An economist at Johannes Kepler University Linz sent 2,142 fake applications to Austrian employers. Identical qualifications, identical experience, different names.
Applicants with a foreign-sounding name were 25 to 30 percent less likely to be invited to interview. Austrians with no migration background achieved a callback rate of 37 percent, the highest of any group tested. Applicants with an African background had to apply roughly twice as often to obtain the same interview.
This is an experiment, not a survey of opinions. Same CV, different name, measurably different outcome.
Housing: the same flat, two callers
In early 2023, SORA tested 157 rental listings for the Austrian Equal Treatment Ombudsman. Two callers, both presented as middle-aged, single, well paid, in permanent technical employment.
The caller named Muhammad Asif was offered a viewing in 50 percent of calls. Michael Gruber, calling afterwards about the same flat, was offered one every single time.
In Vienna, 60 percent of the calls from the first name ended in a refusal or additional conditions. The study found that the extent of the discrimination did not depend on the landlord's own gender, education or migration background, and that much of it happens without the person being aware of it.
Being Muslim in Austria
The EU Fundamental Rights Agency surveyed 9,604 Muslims across 13 EU countries in 2024. Austria came first, with 71 percent reporting racial discrimination, ahead of Germany at 68. Thirty-nine percent reported discrimination when looking for work. Thirty-five percent said they could not rent or buy because of it.
Friendship: Vienna, last in the world
Vienna finishes last in the InterNations expat survey for ease of settling in and for local friendliness. Forty-six percent of foreign residents say locals are unfriendly towards them, against 18 percent globally. Sixty-two percent say it is hard to make local friends.
This one is a self-selected survey rather than an experiment, so it is softer evidence than the two above. But Vienna has finished last or near-last across several years, and locals say the same thing themselves: circles form at school and are not looking for additions.
Autism and work
The figure circulating in Austrian media is that around 80 percent of autistic people in Austria are unemployed, with the stated reason being that no accessible education or training path exists. Treat that number with care: it comes from advocacy and press rather than from a registry. The direction is not disputed anywhere.
Each of these studies isolates one variable. Name. Religion. Autism. Foreignness. Nobody has run the study on someone who is all of them at once, which is why there is no number for what happens then.
Why this page exists
Because the ordinary reading of a life like mine is that the person must be doing something wrong. Otherwise it would not keep happening. That reading is what makes eleven years of evidence feel like eleven years of personal failure, from the inside as much as from outside.
The correspondence studies answer it. Same CV, different name, 25 to 30 percent fewer interviews. The applicant did nothing wrong. They had the wrong name.
And the studies show something else worth noticing: in every one of them, the discrimination happens at the gate. Whether you are invited. Whether you get the viewing. Not at the evaluation afterwards. Which means volume through the same cold channels buys very little, and the only thing that changes the odds is not being a stranger at the door.
Sources
- Doris Weichselbaumer, Discrimination Against Migrant Job Applicants in Austria: An Experimental Study, German Economic Review. Publisher ยท JKU working paper
- SORA for the Gleichbehandlungsanwaltschaft, Ethnische Diskriminierung am Wohnungsmarkt: Ergebnisse eines Paired Ethnic Testings, 2023. Full study (PDF)
- EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, Being Muslim in the EU, 2024. FRA
- InterNations, Expat City Ranking, Vienna last for local friendliness. Press release
- Autism and unemployment in Austria, press reporting. Salzburger Nachrichten