How to detect racial discrimination in hiring

[tevarin]

http://www.slate.com/id/2183053/

A recent example was carried out by economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand. They generated about 5,000 fake job applications and used a computer to add, at random, distinctively black or white names. The employers who received the

Comments

[thisgirliknow]

I don't know if that's necessarily a racial discrimination issue. I was on your side fully until I heard about a study that was done that Will Segal told me about, thinking about it particularly economically.

Those named LaTonya or having other "distinctively" black names are statistically less educated. Parents who name their children unpronouncable names are generally less educated. Employers are more likely to call back William than Wiliam, Randall than Randy. Poor and uneducated families often have messed up spellings of their names simply because they can't spell. Making up random names is also a "poor" thing to do, not a "black" thing to do. Parents shouldn't be as surprised when employers don't call them back. Perhaps they can't even pronounce the name to get a call back, or perhaps a name like "Stefanjuantate" is simply too unprofessional.

In other news, Greg and Emily aren't specifically "white" names. They are European names, and they are more common, well-known names.

Barack Obama has an easily pronouncable name, regardless of it's uniqueness. It does not sound what we may term as "ghetto." "Ghetto" names often go hand in hand with lack of education or good worker qualities.

I think you're confusing educated/affluent/good worker with white.

[subjectivity]

I thought of that too but I don't know, I think the full study would be worth a read in order to see if they controlled for that effect. In the abstract they say,

"We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names."

Doesn't mean it's not still at play, especially since they also say that people from better neighborhood addresses were more likely to be called back regardless of race.

Something to think about: Why is "Stefanjuantate" too "unprofessional"?
Also if we believe in upward mobility in this country, if someone's resume is good, it shouldn't matter what social class their parents are from. Economic discrimination is just as bad as racism.

I don't know what the answer is, except to have more people with unusual names in positions of authority so that people get used to associating those names with professionalism. In the meantime, parents need to accept that names carry weight and even if it's not fair, children with some names might be at an advantage when it comes to getting a job.

I think it would be interesting to find out if these same results applied once the people were called to an interview. I'd be willing to bet that the discrepancy would be smaller.

[thisgirliknow]

Will mentioned that too-- that those who got interviews were hired on a much more "fair" basis with regard to names, it was getting the interview that was the problem

[subjectivity]

this link mentions some follow up studies that may be what Will was citing:
http://liberalorder.typepad.com/the_liberal_order/2004/09/racism_and_dist.html

Also I'd like to remove my comment that economic discrimination is "just as bad" as racism. It's not. But it's still bad.

[tevarin]

Look at the paper and find out:) It's forty pages, so I just skimmed it. They specifically address this concern (ghetto names) in Section 5.

African American babies named Kenya or Jamal are affiliated with much higher mothers’ education than
African American babies named Latonya or Leroy. Conversely, White babies named Carrie or Neil have lower
social background than those named Emily or Geoffrey. This allows for a direct test of the social background
hypothesis within our sample: are names associated with a worse social background discriminated against
more? In the last row in each gender-race group, we report the rank-order correlation between callback
rates and mother’s education. The social background hypothesis predicts a positive correlation. Yet, for all
four categories, we find the exact opposite. The p-values indicate that we cannot reject independence at
standard significance levels except in the case of African American males where we can almost reject it at
the 10 percent level. In summary, this test suggests little evidence that social background drives the extent
of discrimination.
Names might also influence our results through familiarity. It might be that these African American
names simply appear odd to human resource managers and that any odd name faces discrimination. But
as noted earlier, the names we have selected are not particularly uncommon among African Americans (see
Appendix Table 1). We have also performed a similar exercise to that of Table 11 and measured the rank-order
correlation between name-specific callback rates and name frequency for each gender-race group. We
found no systematic positive correlation.

The statistics seem to include some hedging. But the overall evidence is that it's the blackness of the names, not their ghetto background or unpronounceability that hurts chances of getting an interview.