I just read an article: "Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination" by Bertrand & Mullainathon, American Economic Review, September 2004. This study gathered thousands of resumes from the Chicago and Boston areas. Then they rated the resumes as high or low quality. Then they reversed the areas on the resumes, by changing Chicago schools and employers to comparable Boston schools and employers, etc. Then they assigned fictitious addresses to the resumes. The addresses varied by socio-economic status zip codes (resumes were randomly assigned residence zip codes of higher and lower status areas). Finally, the resumes were then randomly assigned white or black sounding names. Black sounding first names included names like Aisha, Ebony, Keisha, Darnell, Hakim, and Jamal. White sounding first names were names like Allison, Anne, Carrie, Brad, Brendan, and Geoffrey. Once these resumes were generated, they were sent out to actual job postings.
The results were amazing. Black-sounding name resumes needed an average of 15 resumes sent out to get a call back for an interview, while white-sounding name resumes needed only 10. If we can generalize these findings, then, this shows that whites have about a 50% advantage in getting a job interview, in a supposedly blind process. Does this finding de-bunk the reverse discrimination myth? I think so! In fact, this finding even held up with EOE employers and federal contractors!
Another interesting, and more troubling finding is that higher-quality white-sounding name resumes got 27% more callbacks than lower-quality white-sounding name resumes. But, higher-quality black name-sounding resumes got only 0.5% more callbacks than lower-quality black name-sounding resumes! Does this finding de-bunk the myth that blacks just need to take more personal responsibility and they will succeed? I think this demonstrates the economic despair that many blacks face.
The problem with the experiment is that it only mentions geographic and soci-economic switches. It doesn't mention anything about actual qualifications being switched. In other words, if you sent out the same resume twice - on one, you put that the applicants name is Tyrone, and the other one is from Geoffrey. That would be a more appropriate experiment to see if the same resume with nothing switched but the names produced different results.
ReplyDeleteAlso, reverse discrimination isn't a myth. In fact, it's more harmful in that when employers fill quotas, they fill them almost solely on nothing but skin color.
-Joe
I usually don't bother responding to comments, I prefer to allow people the opportunity to simply express themselves. But Joe misunderstands the experimental design. White-sounding and black-sounding names were randomly assigned to resumes of the same quality/geographic area. Maybe I didn't do a complete job of explaining the study, experimental design, or results. The article itself is 22 pages and I tried to explain it all in 3 paragraphs. I suggest the interested reader look up the original article.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Joe doesn't seem to mention, or understand, that people that fill jobs with racial quotas still must be qualified to do the job. Discrimination laws do not make employers hire unqualified people.
When you say "resumes of the same quality" are you saying resumes that have the same qualifications? If so, you didn't mention that in your blog. And by definition, using and hiring by racial quotas is reverse discrimination. While an African American guy may be qualified, the guy hiring using racial quotas might pass up a white guy with much better qualifications. After all, doesn't your original blog argue that that shouldn't happen?
ReplyDelete-Joe