PEOPLE WITH ‘FOREIGN-SOUNDING’ NAMES GET FEWER JOB INTERVIEWS
Job applicants with ‘foreign-sounding’ names are considerably less likely to be invited
for an interview than people with Anglo-Saxon names. That is the central finding of
research by Nicolas Jacquemet and Constantine Yannelis, presented at the Royal
Economic Society’s 2011 annual conference.
This discrimination is of the same size as the often-observed discrimination against
African-American names in job applications, suggesting that the discrimination may be
due to a general suspicion about differences rather than a particular ethnicity.
The study responded to 330 job openings in Chicago, sending three different CVs with
names that were Anglo-Saxon sounding, African-American sounding and foreignsounding but without association with any specific minority. The suitability of the last
category was determined by a previous survey in Chicago, where 75% of respondents
did not even attempt to guess the origin of the foreign name.
This experiment found that:
 Seventy-six resumes with Anglo-Saxon names received a call for interview
compared with 52 resumes with an Afro-American name and 54 resumes with a
foreign name.
 This suggests that Anglo-Saxon names are 40% more likely to receive a call
back than African-American or foreign names.
 This discrimination is concentrated in companies in the suburbs, where ‘white
flight’ – white families choosing to leave an area once black families begin to
move in – has produced areas with a very low ethnic mix.
These results suggest that discrimination arises because of a general mistrust of
outsiders rather than a mistrust of specific minorities. The authors argue that
government policies that target discrimination against specific minorities will miss out on
preventing discrimination against others: governments should turn their attention to
removing the chance for discrimination of any kind by making all resumes anonymous.
More…
This paper shows that racial discrimination in the labour market goes well beyond the
unequal treatment of specific, clearly identified minorities.
The study finds that job applicants with a foreign-sounding name, which is not
associated with any particular minority, elicit 40% fewer call-backs compared with
identical applicants with Anglo-Saxon sounding names.
What is more, the discrimination rate is exactly the same as observed for AfricanAmerican applicants: 40% fewer call-backs than similar resumes with Anglo-Saxon
sounding names.
The extent of racial discrimination is now well established, and ranges from a 30-50%
drop in the likelihood of receiving a positive answer as a result of the perceived ethnicity
of the name appearing on the resume. Perhaps the most striking fact is that this result
remains the same across countries, geographic regions and ethnic minorities.
This may suggest that discrimination arises because of a general mistrust of any
individual identified as an outsider of the dominant group, rather than a targeted
mistrust against specific minorities – that is, suspicions of dissimilarities rather than
differences.
To test this assumption, the researchers ran a correspondence test in Chicago. They
used three different sets of names: Anglo-Saxon sounding names, African-American
sounding names and foreign-sounding names without further association with any
specific minority.
To assess this last property, they ran a preliminary survey in Chicago, asking
respondents their guesses for the ethnic origin of each name shown to them. The
foreign-sounding set of names include names for which more than 75% respondents
either left the field blank or put a question mark.
The researchers responded to 330 job offers, sending three different resumes – one
from each set of names – to each employer. They cycle names on the resumes from
one answer to the other, so that resumes’ quality is equally distributed across perceived
ethnicity of names.
The measure of success is the number of call-backs elicited by the applications. This is
the case with 76 resumes with an Anglo-Saxon name, 52 resumes with an AfricanAmerican name and 54 resumes with a foreign name.
It is not possible to measure how these differences would lead to different job offers,
since hiring depends on actual interviews (declined by email following each positive
answer). But this is clear evidence of a disadvantage of individuals possessing a nonAnglo-Saxon name in the labour market, since they have to send more than one third
more resumes to elicit the same number of interviews.
We further check the robustness this result by looking at the discrimination intensity
from employers, measured as the number of employers who either call-back or
discriminate against only one resume out of the three they received from us. In either
case, non Anglo-Saxon applicants are both and equally unfavoured as compared to
Anglo-Saxons.
The study further investigates the assumption by splitting the results according to the
geographic location of the employer. Once call-backs are disaggregated according to
whether the employer is in the city proper or the suburbs, it appears the whole
discrimination pattern comes from the suburbs, where the ‘white flight’ phenomenon –
white families choosing to leave an area once black families begin to move in – has
produced very high ethnic homogeneity.
In the policy sphere, these results suggest that affirmative action programmes will miss
a substantial proportion of those affected adversely by discrimination in targeting
explicitly identified ethnic minorities. This should turn attention to programmes that rule
out as much name identification as possible in the job matching process, such as
mandatory anonymity of resumes.
ENDS
‘Indiscriminate Discrimination: A Correspondence Test for Ethnic Homophily in the
Chicago Labor Market’ by Nicolas Jacquemet (University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne &
Paris School of Economics) and Constantine Yannelis (Stanford University)
Contacts:
Nicolas Jacquemet: nicolas.jacquemet@univ-paris1.fr; Cell. +33 6 38 42 25 10 ; Tel.
+33 1 44 07 83 66
Constantine Yannelis: yannelis@stanford.edu