RESUMEN
Each year a substantial share of the European population suffers from major depression. This mental illness may affect individuals' later life outcomes indirectly by the stigma it inflicts. The present study assesses hiring discrimination based on disclosed depression. To this end, between May 2015 and July 2015, we sent out 288 trios of job applications from fictitious candidates to real vacancies in Belgium. Within each trio, one candidate claimed to have become unemployed only recently, whereas the other two candidates revealed former depression or no reason at all for their unemployment during a full year. Disclosing a year of inactivity due to former depression decreases the probability of getting a job interview invitation by about 34% when compared with candidates who just became unemployed, but the stigma effect of a year of depression is not significantly higher than the stigma effect of a year of unexplained unemployment. In addition, we found that these stigmas of depression and unemployment were driven by our male trios of fictitious candidates. As a consequence, our results are in favour of further research on gender heterogeneity in the stigma of depression and other health impairments.
Asunto(s)
Trastorno Depresivo Mayor/complicaciones , Trastorno Depresivo Mayor/psicología , Discriminación en Psicología , Solicitud de Empleo , Estigma Social , Bélgica , Empleo/psicología , Empleo/estadística & datos numéricos , Humanos , Selección de Personal/estadística & datos numéricos , Factores SexualesRESUMEN
There is growing evidence that health factors affect tertiary education success in a causal way. This study assesses the effect of sleep quality on academic achievement at university. To this end, we surveyed 804 students about their sleep quality by means of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) before the start of their first exam period in December 2013 at Ghent University. PSQI scores were merged with course marks in this exam period. Instrumenting PSQI scores by sleep quality during secondary education, we find that increasing total sleep quality with one standard deviation leads to 4.85 percentage point higher course marks. Based on this finding, we suggest that higher education providers might be incentivised to invest part of their resources for social facilities in professional support for students with sleep and other health problems.