Which is slightly more accurate than the previous entry; haven't been by there in ages.
So, there's this entry:
Plastic: What's In A Name? Well, It Might Be Your Next Job...
"Two professors at the University of Chicago and MIT conducted an experiment:
Nine names were selected to represent each category: black women, white women, black men and white men. Last names common to the racial group were also assigned. Four résumés were typically submitted for each job opening, drawn from a reservoir of 160. Nearly 5,000 applications were submitted from mid-2001 to mid-2002. [The professors] kept track of which candidates were invited for job interviews.
"So what happened?:
Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called for interviews than were those with black-sounding names.
"Surprising? Maybe not, but certainly something to think about when it comes to naming Junior or Juniorette." And what the hell is a 'black-sounding name' anyway? 'Ebony'? 'Charcoal'?
It's that last sentence drives home the point that I'm not supposed to be there.
Yes, what do those people name their children? Surprised they didn't toss in 'Buckwheat' or something.
Reading the actual article -- does anyone do that these days? -- there's an answer, right at the top:
To test whether employers discriminate against black job applicants, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan of M.I.T. conducted an unusual experiment. They selected 1,300 help-wanted ads from newspapers in Boston and Chicago and submitted multiple résumés from phantom job seekers. The researchers randomly assigned the first names on the résumés, choosing from one set that is particularly common among blacks and from another that is common among whites.
So Kristen and Tamika, and Brad and Tyrone, applied for jobs from the same pool of want ads and had equivalent résumés. Nine names were selected to represent each category: black women, white women, black men and white men. Last names common to the racial group were also assigned.
[. . .] Apart from their names, applicants had the same experience, education and skills, so employers had no reason to distinguish among them.
The results are disturbing. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called for interviews than were those with black-sounding names. Interviews were requested for 10.1 percent of applicants with white-sounding names and only 6.7 percent of those with black-sounding names.
[. . .] At the low end, the interview-request rate was 2.2 percent for Aisha, 3.8 percent for Keisha and 5.4 percent for Tamika, compared with 9.1 percent for Kenya and Latonya and 10.5 percent for Ebony.
Hey, what do you know? That is a black-sounding name. Oh, the hilarity.
There might be something intelligent in the comments at Plastic, but I'd rather not risk losing even more of my will to live.
From another write-up, this one at HR Daily News >
Study Finds Influence of Name Discrimination:
Applicants with white-sounding names, such as Kristen or Brad, were 50 percent more likely to be called for an interview than were those with black-sounding names, such as Tamika and Tyrone, according to the study.
[. . .] The results were even more striking for the nine names used that are common among black folks. For example, Aisha had an interview-request rate of 2.2 percent, compared with 9.1 percent for Kenya and Latonya, the Times reports.
Another issue raises serious concern among the authors of the study. For names common among white people, the researchers found when an applicants credentials increased, so did the prospective employees chances of getting called in for an interview. However, this is much less so for applicants with names common among black people.
I suppose if there's zero chance you or anyone you know might possibly be affected by this -- you're a white guy named Brad Majors or something, and either have no black friends, or none with "black-sounding names" -- this is all quite amusing.
Asshole.
Update: Decided to have a look for the actual research paper. The authors, according to the Times article, are Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand. No joy.
And I heard a bit about this study -- or rather, the article about the study -- on The Tavis Smiley Show a few days back.
Didn't seem worth commenting on at the time, because I can't say I was surprised at the findings. . .
Update: Well, I suck. There is a PDF of the paper, "Are Emily and Brendan More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination," linked at Yale's Department of Economics Applied Microeconomics Workshop. As was mentioned in a comment from Anarchus, in the thread at Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal about all this.
Which link I only saw at Kieran Healy's Weblog because of Drapetomaniac's comment here.
I should get out more often.