(The Independent) -  The report's author suggested that Muslim women may be discriminated against by Islamophobic employers in the application process who discern their faith from religious attire such as a hijab.

Educated Muslim women are much less likely to be employed than non-Muslim women, even when they have the same qualifications, new research has suggested.

The study found that the unemployment rate for Muslim women is between 5.9 per cent and 27 percent depending on the woman’s ethnic background. By contrast, the rate for white non-Muslim women is 3.5 percent.

A similar gap was noted among professional occupations whereby 8.5 percent to 23 percent of Muslim women are employed depending on ethnicity, compared to 32 percent of white non-Muslim women.

The study dismissed the idea that this was because Muslim women may be less likely to have educational qualifications than other social groups, as the same trends were observed even when both Muslim and non-Muslim women had the exact same credentials. 

The research is a joint undertaking between Dr Nabil Khattab of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar and Dr Shereen Hussein of King’s College London and involved data analysis of more than a quarter of a million women’s lives. It was presented yesterday at the British Sociological Association's annual conference.

Dr Khattab said: “Economic activity among Muslim women in the UK remains considerably lower and their unemployment rate remains significantly higher than the majority group even after controlling for qualifications and other individual characteristics.”

He added that Muslim women’s dress might reveal their religion to potential employers in more obvious ways than Muslim men or non-Muslim women, which enabled Islamophobic employers to discriminate. He said: “They wear a hijab or other religious symbols which makes them more visible and as such exposed to greater discrimination.”

Last year hate crimes against Muslims in London were found to have risen by 70 per cent upon the previous year. In particular, the Met Police noted a number of Islamophobic incidents in which women wearing headscarves were attacked and strangers attempted to remove their veils.

Siobhan Fenton