The Problem / Context
A major job search platform was exploring a feature that would allow users to voluntarily self-identify aspects of their personal identity, including race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation, in order to connect them with employers, networks, and events committed to diversity and inclusion. Before building, the company wanted to understand how users in different markets felt about the intersection of personal identity and professional life, and whether such a feature would be welcomed, viewed with suspicion, or complicated by legal and cultural factors. Research was conducted across France, Germany, the United States, and Japan.
My Role
I was the researcher responsible for the French market, working as part of a team of researchers conducting parallel interviews across all four countries. My remit covered the full research cycle for France: assisting with participant recruitment, translating and localising research materials to ensure they were culturally appropriate and aligned with the client brief, conducting all French-language interviews, synthesising findings, and contributing to the cross-market analysis that brought together a coherent overall story while surfacing the specificities of each market.
Recruitment for this project was particularly challenging given the sensitivity of the topic and the need for participants with specific identity profiles. I supplemented the recruitment agency's efforts by reaching out through my own networks to find participants who met the harder-to-fill criteria. I also contributed to cross-market synthesis, reviewing findings from other countries to identify patterns, differences, and the overall narrative across markets.
The project moved on a very compressed timeline, from recruitment to final delivery in approximately two weeks.
Methodology
In-depth qualitative interviews with six to eight participants per market across France, Germany, the United States, and Japan. The research design took a pragmatic approach to sensitive subject matter, framing questions around the specific intersection of identity and job seeking rather than identity in the abstract, which helped participants engage with the topic in a professional context they found meaningful. Participant self-selection through the recruitment process also played a role: people who signed up for a study explicitly about personal characteristics and bias were, by nature, more comfortable discussing these topics, which is worth noting as a limitation alongside the richness of what was shared.
Rapport building was a deliberate and important part of the interview approach. As a Black woman interviewing participants about experiences of identity and discrimination, I was conscious of the dynamic this created and worked to build trust without introducing bias, creating space for participants to speak openly about experiences they might not share with every researcher.
Key Findings
The research revealed deep cultural and legal differences in how people relate to personal identity in a professional context, with implications that significantly complicated the feature concept.
In the United States, participants were considerably more open to sharing personal identity information in a professional setting, and more familiar with being asked about it, seeing it as a potential tool for finding like-minded employers and building community. In France and Germany, the picture was more nuanced. Most participants were proud of their identities and acknowledged the reality of discrimination in the workplace. However, they were strongly reluctant to lead with those identities professionally, expressing a clear desire to be evaluated on ability alone. The concern was not just cultural but deeply personal: participants did not want to be seen as receiving opportunities for the wrong reasons or having their abilities overshadowed by their characteristics.
Across all markets, minority participants reported having experienced discrimination in hiring and the workplace, and many expressed interest in tools that could help address systemic inequity. But they wanted to do so indirectly, without having their identity characteristics front and centre in a professional context.
The legal dimension added a further layer of complexity. In France, collecting data on race and ethnicity is prohibited by law, making certain aspects of the feature concept legally unworkable in their proposed form. This was not something the client had fully anticipated going into the research.
What I Delivered
Country-level synthesis reports and a combined cross-market analysis with recommendations, covering cultural attitudes, legal constraints, and the conditions under which a feature of this kind might find acceptance in each market.
Outcomes / Impact
The research appears to have meaningfully redirected the feature's development. The legal constraints identified in France and the cultural resistance to explicit identity disclosure across European markets raised significant questions about the viability of the feature as originally conceived. The research pointed toward a need for more indirect or proxy-based approaches to connecting users around shared experiences of identity and discrimination, rather than explicit self-identification fields.
The findings also contributed to a broader conversation about the political and cultural climate around identity in the workplace, which has continued to shift across all markets studied. The tension the research surfaced, between the desire for meritocracy and the acknowledgment that discrimination is real and systemic, reflects an ongoing and unresolved challenge that platforms operating across multiple markets will need to continue navigating.