Drawing on a novel public opinion survey covering 26 countries across various world regions, we analyse citizens‘ support the idea that job recruitment should be based on applicants‘ qualifications, rather than on ascriptive characteristics such as gender, family background, ethnicity, or religion. To understand attitude variation, we derive hypotheses from two theories: world society theory and modernisation theory. We find strong support for non-discrimination in most surveyed countries, but significant cross-country variation. Further analyses demonstrate that while both theories contribute to explaining citizens‘ attitudes, a country‘s degree of modernisation is not significantly associated with attitudes toward non-discrimination, whereas the degree of a country‘s embeddedness into world society is. At the individual level, most hypotheses derived from both theories are confirmed. Individuals who prioritise the equality of all people, possess higher levels of education, are secular, and hold post-materialist values are more likely to support the idea of non-discrimination.