A research article by Dr Raimonda Bublienė and Dr Ingrida Mačernytė-Panomariovienė, researchers at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, and Dr Aurelija Burinskienė, Associate Professor at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, entitled “Intersectional Discrimination in Employment in the Digital Age: Sex, Age, Email Non-Use and Unemployment in the EU”, has been published in the international open-access journal “Social Sciences.”

The article uses Eurostat data for the 27 EU Member States for 2016–2025 and applies two-way fixed-effects models to examine the association between email non-use and unemployment, separately for men and women aged 25–54 and 55–74. The researchers found a positive association between higher rates of email non-use and unemployment among people aged 25–54. However, this association is not sufficiently robust: the results change substantially when country-specific linear trends are included, while additional analysis also raises concerns about the temporal ordering of the variables. The estimates for the 55–74 age group are statistically inconclusive. The authors therefore emphasise that the observed relationships should be understood as specification-sensitive conditional associations rather than causal relationships. Email non-use does not in itself measure digital skills, while the statistical data do not allow for determining whether individuals experienced discrimination or which specific factors contributed to their unemployment. The findings do not support the conclusion that reducing email non-use would reduce unemployment. The article notes that further research on intersectional discrimination should examine separately the specific barriers that may be faced by women from ethnic minorities, older women and women with disabilities, while avoiding the assumption that the experiences of all these groups are uniform.

The article was prepared as part of the postdoctoral fellowship project “Analysis of Multiple Discrimination and Labour Income: A Comparative Study of the Legal Regulation in European Countries (MEDALIC)”, implemented at the LSMC Law Institute and funded by the Research Council of Lithuania. More information about the project is available here: https://teise.org/en/projektai/medalic/.

The full article is available here.