Ethnic and Gender Discrimination in the Private Rental Housing Market in Finland: A Field Experiment

Abstract

Ethnic and gender discrimination in a variety of housing markets is documented in several populations. We conducted an online field experiment to examine ethnic and gender discrimination in the private rental housing market in Finland. We sent 1459 inquiries regarding 800 apartments. We compared responses to standardized apartment inquiries including fictive Arabic-sounding, Finnish-sounding or Swedish-sounding female or male names. We found evidence of discrimination against Arabic-sounding names and against male names. Inquiries including Arabic-sounding male names had the lowest probability of receiving a response, receiving a response to about 16% of the inquiries made, while Finnish-sounding female names received a response to 42% of the inquiries. We did not find any evidence of landlords’ gender moderating the observed discrimination pattern. The findings suggest that both ethnic and gender discrimination occur in the private rental housing market in Finland.