Black-sounding names less likely to receive job call backs than white-sounding ones: Study

The Hill ^ | Apr 12, 2024 | CHEYANNE M. DANIELS

[where's_the_Outrage?]

A new study shows that employers are less likely to call back applicants with Black-sounding names than those with white-sounding ones.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago recently filed 83,000 fake job applications for 11,000 entry-level positions at multiple Fortune 500 companies with names like Brad, Greg, Darnell, Lamar, Amanda, Kristen, Ebony and Latoya.

The study, “A Discrimination Report Card,” found that the white-sounding applicant names were favored up to 24 percent more than the likely Black applicants.

“It’s of course upsetting and discouraging that in the year 2023 and so on that this phenomenon persists and can be at the level that it can be detected with an experiment like ours,” Evan K. Rose, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and co-author of the report, said.

The 2021 study built upon research from a 2003 study, which found that applicants with names that sounded white got 50 percent more callbacks than those whose names sounded Black.

The new report also found that the percentage of discrimination varied among industries and went onto name companies with the worst rates. Auto dealers and car part retailers were the least likely to call back Black applicants.

[rxh4n1]

“What contact information did they include? Did all 83,000 fake job applications have the same phone number and email address? Did the return information go back to university non-student accounts?”

Bingo. I like the way you think. I’ll venture to suggest they didn’t create 83,000 different resumes either, just 83,000 different names.

[ThanhPhero]

I have the perspective of one whose primary years were spent in a Calvert System private school for US military and businessmen in Istanbul in the fifties with Uncle Sam paying for it, then re-entering American public schools and coming to the realization that I was multiple years ahead of everyone else. I got more US and World history in 3rd and 4th grade tan I got from 7-12th. The other subjects were comparable. And then as an adult I saw what JrHi/middle schoolers were getting in the 60s and that standards were declining. In Istanbul the first three grades got read to by the teacher for an hour in each 6 hour day from Dickens and Ivanhoe and The Black Arrow, and other what we would consider now as adult books that appealed to kids without being way out of our ken like Shakespeare which the 7th graders had to read themselves. My oldest went to PS but got all advanced classes including Latin in HS. Those classes are not offered any more in that system and she studied a lot on her own time. The other three went to a mix of parochial schools and home school because I and my wife, who was a school teacher, were disgusted with public schools

[Zathras]

I had a co-worker very similar.
Once they get in, it is almost impossible to get them out.