We study the results of a massive nationwide correspondence experiment sending more than 83,000 fictitious applications with randomized characteristics to geographically dispersed jobs posted by 108 of the largest U.S. employers. Distinctively Black names reduce the probability of employer contact by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively white names. The magnitude of this racial gap in contact rates differs substantially across firms, exhibiting a between-company standard deviation of 1.9 percentage points.
This is from the abstract of Patrick M. Kline, Evan K. Rose, and Christopher R. Walters, “Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers,” Becker-Friedman Institute Working Paper No. 2021-94.
The authors focus solely on discrimination but don’t speculate about why that discrimination takes place. I wonder if they would consider the following hypothesis.
An employer puts out a job description and asks for potential employees to submit applications. Due to the high cost of knowing, without hiring and experiencing, whether a potential employee will be productive, employers look for low-cost proxy variables to help them make relatively quick decisions. One such variable is the first name of the applicant. The authors of the study point out, correctly, that people with a given first name such as Antwan, Kareem, and Tyrone (they list 19 such names in their Appendix B) have a high probability of being black. The authors find discrimination against applicants with such names. But why might an employer who cares only about productivity and how the employee gets along with other applicants discriminate against job applicants with what the authors call black names? Could it be because people with such names are more likely than the average black person to come from a home with only one parent, typically the mother, present? We know from other data that people brought up in single-parent households do less well in school and are more likely to engage in crime. Could this be what potential employers are trying to avoid?
The authors also list 19 last names that are more likely to be black names. Here would have been an interesting way to test my hypothesis. Given their large sample size, they could have done it. Pair “black” first names, not with “black” last names, but half and half. That is, pair half of the black first names with black last names and half of the black first names with “white” last names. Then see what difference the black first name makes. If my speculation is correct, then they would find more discrimination based on black first names than based on black last names.
For the article on discrimination in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, see Linda Gorman, “Discrimination.”
READER COMMENTS
John hare
Aug 15 2021 at 7:32pm
Locally a Hispanic name is very likely to get a call.
John C Goodman
Aug 15 2021 at 7:58pm
I think the names they used are more likely to be seen as foreign than black. When hiring immigrants, employers are likely to wonder about proficiency with the English language and adaptability to the culture.
A better test would be to use the same names but identify the applicants as back and white. Then see if there is a difference.
Mark Z
Aug 15 2021 at 8:35pm
I was thinking something similar: see if a black person named James Smith is more likely to get a response than a black person named Antwan Smith (or how either compares to a white Antwan) but I assume there are legal issues with asking for an applicant’s race, so I’m guessing an applicant volunteering that information gratuitously would seem a bit bizarre, perhaps tipping the employee off that they’re being studied.
robc
Aug 16 2021 at 12:33am
I recently changed jobs and every job I applied for online had a set of standard questions including race. With a “do not wish to answer” option.
It would be super easy to test what you propose. Create two identical accounts (except for race) on indeed/dice/etc with identical names and spam resumes out.
robc
Aug 16 2021 at 12:36am
If you worked at, say, indeed, you would probably have access to the data to test it yourself. They might not want to do it internally, or they already have, but not for publication.
Matthias
Aug 16 2021 at 12:43am
Companies that collect this race information only use it for their statistics, but the people deciding on hiring never get to see the data for any individual candidate.
JFA
Aug 16 2021 at 6:44am
Out of 19 names in the male column, I’d say Hakim, Kareem, and Rasheed sound foreign, maybe Jamal (but probably not, I knew several Jamals growing up who had no close immigrant relations), so the issue is probably not about signaling immigrant status in this particular case (though this Canadian paper (https://oreopoulos.faculty.economics.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Why-Do-Skilled-Immigrants-Struggle-in-the-Labor-Market.pdf) discusses discrimination against Asian (specifically, Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani) and Greek sounding names (even when an English first name is paired with a Chinese last name)).
Roland Fryer, et al (2004) discussed the potential signaling of socio-economic status names might perform. So there is certainly a cultural fit aspect that names signal. I would like to see someone do a resume study with stereotypical white names like Bubba, MarySue, or Billy Bob.
robc
Aug 16 2021 at 8:23am
It would be interesting to see how much better William Robert does than Billy Bob.
Philo
Aug 16 2021 at 3:10pm
“A better test would be to use the same names but identify the applicants as back and white.” Better, if you want a test purely of racial discrimination. (But the application form would not ask for the race of the applicant; how would you convey that information?) But this was a test of discrimination not against blacks in general but against blacks in a certain subculture, marked by their subculture-specific first names.
Daniel
Aug 15 2021 at 9:04pm
“Could it be because people with such names are more likely than the average black person to…” (emphases added) does all the work here taking explicit illegal disparate treatment discrimination to disparate impact (whether you agree with it or not) discrimination (though the size of the bias might not mean it rise to the level of illegality). And this is a pretty sophisticated set of conditional probabilities for a resume-glancing employer to calculate and internalize in guiding their hiring decisions. Occam’s razor might say that inferred-race bias is the big mover here, yielding a small but noticeable effect, which is why the authors interpreted it that way.
John C Goodman has a good point that this could be ingroup-outgroup instead of anti-black discrimination per se. Explicitly identifying race though does not rectify that, provided most hirers are white. One could look at the interaction of condition (whether name-implied or explicit racial identification) and the race of the hirer to help get some insight on that. But prior research has attempted to tackle non-racial biases in explaining observed racial discrepancies, and the results suggest only partial coverage (just as an example, bias in black vs. white as colors partially, but not fully, explains black vs. white bias on the IAT). In this case, with exogenous variation helping inference-making, ingroup-outgroup as an alternative explanation to racial bias is only mildly comforting as the practice would still be pretty ignorant; David’s non-racial rationale would be much more comforting, but is…shall I say, a stretch.
Phil H
Aug 16 2021 at 10:36am
I assume the authors of the paper do not make a rash jump to the conclusion “businesses are racist.” And if they don’t, there isn’t much need for us to. (I recognise that some people will, but those people will have to be responsible for their own arguments.) I think the right reading of this paper is that people who are black often face slightly more difficulty in many different areas of their lives. This seems like useful knowledge to me.
There just isn’t any need to pre-emptively second guess the paper to prove that there’s no racism.
Henri Hein
Aug 16 2021 at 3:22pm
Honestly, I find that unlikely. I have been in various positions of reviewing resumes myself. I have screened hundreds of resumes and discussed a large number of them with my peers and managers. Maybe some of those people secretly harbored concerns about the socio-economic conditions of the applicants, but if so, it is not something that ever came up. I also wonder if the decision makers are attuned enough to the stats to explicitly worry about single-parent backgrounds.
If there is an effect at all, I would expect it to be in the opposite direction. There is usually a respect for applicants that show an inclination to break odds. For instance, if somebody had gone to some third-tier community college and later been a researcher at Stanford, I would assume them to have an unusual combination of talent and ambition.
Dylan
Aug 16 2021 at 4:20pm
Going to focus on the preceding sentence from the one that Henri quotes. Do you have any reason to suspect that this is true? More importantly, even if this is true, do you think the average person reading resumes would make that assumption?
Isn’t the simpler explanation that being black also correlates with these things and a rational employer that is looking to screen applicants as quickly as possible uses this as a shortcut to dismiss an applicant and maybe doesn’t even get to their school record? You seem to be doing some heroic lifting to assume that the employer isn’t unconsciously biased based on race, but instead is biased in a different totally rational way.
Mark Z
Aug 17 2021 at 3:34pm
I half-agree with you. I do think it’s a reasonable to have a prior that there are average differences between black guys named Dave and black guys named Antwan (or a white guy named Dave and a white guy named Bubbah), but that’s probably not all that’s going on. But it’s also fascinating to me the how much more acceptable it is seen as (and I think there’s an overtone here in Pierre’s post) to discriminate on the basis of an applicant’s name, than to so on their race, even though the former is also an immutable trait.
robc
Aug 18 2021 at 11:33am
Names aren’t immutable.
First, you can legally change them. Secondly, you have options as to how you list it on a resume. See the comment above about William Robert vs Billy Bob.
Even if everyone calls you Billy Bob, it might, depending on the job, be prudent to list your full legal name instead.
Johnson85
Aug 16 2021 at 6:08pm
If they are just testing the largest employees, a portion of the issue may be that they tend to be more bureaucratic and to the extent hiring managers are allowed input before applicants are contacted, the hiring managers may have been taught hard lessons about hiring people from protected classes. I’m not sure how common this is, but something I’ve seen three times at three different companies (two with thousands of employees, one with probably less than a thousand) is that when a hiring manager hires a racial minority, they find that they have lost some of their autonomy with respect to how they do their job. Whereas they are given pretty wide latitude with how to manage promotions, discipline, firings, etc. with non-minority employees as long as they follow the guidance provided by HR, everything they do gets extra scrutiny when they are dealing with minorities and they basically can’t do anything without HR signing off on it, and have to hold them to a different standard, which aside from interfering with their team’s performance also creates morale issues.
So it makes it much risker for the hiring manager because if they hire a non-minority, if they aren’t the right fit, they can discipline them and then fire them. Certainly doesn’t look good for them, but not going to be a problem if it’s not a recurring theme. But if they hire a minority and it’s a bad fit, they just have to figure out how to make it work, but they are still responsible if the employee screws up and still responsible for meeting all their goals even if they have non-performing team members.
The most extreme of the three was concerned because he was essentially being threatened with adverse action for giving poor performance reviews to a minority. He ended up leaving that employer shortly thereafter, but if he had stayed, I’m sure he would have been a little hesitant to hire an employee that he would not be allowed to give honest feedback too, much less discipline.
Not sure how common that is but I could definitely see it having an impact.
john hare
Aug 17 2021 at 3:15am
I have heard of the same problem in one small government office. Preference to the white because they could be fired without issues. Preference developed because of previous problems with certain minorities. Biggest loser becoming the minority person that will play it straight losing out because of previous problems with people starting with racist accusations by non-performers.
Brandon Berg
Aug 17 2021 at 4:23am
The paper does show response rates broken out by first name, and there doesn’t seem to be any discernible difference in response rates between underclass and middle-class black names (e.g. Jerome and Reginald). It’s hard to say for sure, though.
Interestingly, the effect seems to be mostly concentrated in retail jobs, suggesting that the employers are less racist themselves than concerned about customers being racist.
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