Job seekers who indicated they were gay were far less likely to be given interviews with Cypriot companies, a study from the United Kingdom has found.

The results the openly gay men and lesbians were 40 percent less likely to get in the front door, a bigger gap than other European countries. costing Cypriot firms a potential big loss in talent. Curiously, the 40 percent gap was the same in the United States.

A team led by Economics Professor Nick Drydakis at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge sent out more than 9,000 applications from four fictitious 30-year-olds, two male and two female, for jobs listed on Cypriot online employment sites, the Bloomberg news agency reported.

The resumes were identical except for the “interests” section, where one fictitious applicant of each gender listed volunteer work for an environmental charity and the others said they’d worked with the Cypriot Homosexual Association.

Lesbian applicants in the study were invited in to interview for companies that pay 5.8 percent less on average than the firms that offered interviews to the study’s straight female applicants.

That pay gap increased to 9.2 percent for the gay male applicants. Studies in other European countries have also shown discrimination, Drydakis said, though results point to only a 6 percent gap in Sweden and around 25 percent in Greece.