New study finds labor market discrimination against blacks still exists

[thebac]

This article is for the people who I hear/read moaning about "reverse" discrimination. Well, apparently, the other kind of discrimination, the one against blacks, has anything but vanished. I haven't gotten around to reading the actual study yet, but here's the summary from yesterday's Washington Post. The researchers' findings are pretty astonishing and quite outrageous. I didn't think that discrimination had disappeared, but to see that it was still that bad and that blatant? Wow!

washingtonpost.com
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By Richard Morin

Sunday, August 3, 2003; Page B05


Two Chicago women respond by letter to the same newspaper ad for a job as a sales clerk. They have exactly the same qualifications and write similar letters. One is named Emily. The other is named Lakisa.

Two Boston men see an ad in the local paper for a sales manager's job. They have identical qualifications and send similar application letters. One is named Brad. The other is named Leroy.

Guess who was more likely to get a favorable reply from a potential employer? Sadly, you probably guessed it: Emily and Brad were 50 percent more likely to get a callback than Lakisa and Leroy -- a huge disparity that surprised even the two economists who conducted this test of labor market discrimination.

Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago School of Business and Sendhil Mullainathan of MIT sent 5,000 fake résumés in response to 1,300 help-wanted ads that ran in newspapers in Boston and Chicago.

They varied the faux applicants' names, randomly alternating between 20 stereotypically black names such as "Tanisha," "Jamal" and "Kenya" and 20 stereotypically white names such as "Greg," "Kristen" and "Todd." (The names weren't selected on a whim -- Bertrand and Mullainathan analyzed birth records in Massachusetts to find names favored by blacks but largely ignored by whites, and vice versa.)

The letters these phony job seekers sent to prospective employers listed their qualifications and contained no mention of their race. But apparently the first name was enough to tip the scales of bigotry. "Applicants with white names need to send about 10 résumés to get one callback whereas applicants with African American names need to send around 15 résumés to get one callback," the researchers reported in a working paper published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. "This 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant. Based on our estimates, a white names yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience."

They also found that employers whose help-wanted ads explicitly stated that they were an "Equal Opportunity Employer" were as likely to favor Todd over Tyronne as companies that didn't make this claim. Moreover, "federal contractors, who are thought to be more severely constrained by affirmative action laws, do not discriminate less," they discovered.

Mullainathan and Bertrand also found that race skewed the apparent value of a glittering résumé. Among the apparently white applicants, people with more experience and better qualifications got lots more calls.

That wasn't a surprise, but this was: Better credentials had "a much smaller effect for African Americans," barely improving the odds that they would get a callback.

"Discrimination therefore appears to bite twice, making it harder not only for African Americans to find a job but also to improve their employability" by acquiring more work experience or desirable skills, they concluded.

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