[lbo-talk] employers aren't racist, they just care if your parents were poor

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Mon Oct 27 06:58:18 PST 2003



> but little other socioeconomic information. Thus, a recent NBER
> working paper by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan found
> that call-back rates on identical (and made-up) résumés were
> substantially higher for white-sounding names such as Emily and Greg.

Another thought. This study can possibly conflate the effects of xenophobia and racism. In other words, the hiring officials may "filter out" all unusual, foreign sounding names, not just Blacks. This may explain why the only employers who responded to my resumes (featuring S. Wojciech Sokolowski) are government agencies. Of all resumes I sent out in my life, I did not get a single response from a private employer (other than thank you, we are not interested in you).

A better experiment would include resumes with: A. "Minstream" names (Greg, Emily, etc.) B. Foreign -sounding names indicating a minority commonly associated with low socio-economic status (SES), eg, Blacks or Hispanics C. Foreign-sounding name indication a minority commonly associated with high SES, e.g. Indian, Asian or German D. Foreign-sounding names not commonly associated with any particular minority

and then compare the response ratios for each of these groups. My suspicion is that the results would be as follows

A > C > B = D Which is consistent with the xenophobic rather than racist pattern. In substantive terms, the preference would be for an American over a foreigner, but if a foreigner were to be considered, the preference would be for a conventionally "high" status group (e.g. German, French, or Asian) over a low status group or an unknown group.

Wojtek



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