The Feeling of Discrimination and Job-Market Entry in France

This research focuses on individuals who consider they have been victims of discrimination in France. The aim is to look at the feeling of discrimination young people may feel due to their "foreign origin" and to assess its links on career paths, seven years after leaving school in 1998. We used the method for clustering self-organising maps, supplemented by an econometric analysis to distinguish eight major classes of career pathways. The aim is to see how the fact of declaring having suffered discrimination may influence the professional situation of these young adults. By looking at both the time it takes to get a stable job and the quality of entry into the labour market, we were able to identify certain trends which differentiate the experiences of young persons of foreign origin suffering discrimination from those of other youths: the former need more time to get a steady job, while the quality of their work is lower and they may also suffer from both these disadvantages. Qualitative interviews were conducted with young people declaring discrimination in order to complement our statistical results. All the results show that the link between discrimination and career path is not so strong as one might think.