All those years, that all those teachers mispronounced my exotic name by accident has irrevocably scarred my delicate psyche. However, apparently that isn’t as important as what employers think of my name. Before working for Sepia Mutiny I applied to several other blog jobs and they all rejected me. I always thought it was due to my inferior blogging skills, never suspecting something more sinister was afoot. Finally, upon joining Sepia Mutiny I was among my own kind. Names like Vallloooopillliillli and Peedidiliakalli and…Vij, are common around this outfit. Now, at last, the plot that held back one with my talents has been revealed. As exposed in the San Jose Mercury News today:
Asian women are near the bottom of the heap when it comes to responses to résumés sent to California temporary agencies, according to a new study.
One Cal student was so disturbed by the data, “I called my father and asked if I should change my name?”
“It really bummed me out,” the unidentified Chinese-American student wrote in e-mail feedback to her professor. She would be graduating in a few months and heading into the job market.
The study, released last week by the Berkeley-based Discrimination Research Center, found that having an Arab or South Asian name — like “Mohammed Ahmed” — in California meant having fewer responses than whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians when it came to seeking a job at temporary employment agencies.
Is this some “leftist” group making this stuff up?
In the fall of 2003, the center sent out 6,000 nearly identical résumés to 350 temporary agencies in seven parts of the state. Twenty names — from “David Larson” to “Samira Al-Amin” to “LaKeisha Johnson” — were at the top of those résumés.
“Heidi McKenzie,” who sent out 289 résumés via e-mail, was the top job candidate with 36.7 percent response rate overall across the state, even though Heidi’s résumé was exactly the same as several of her competitors — including those who would be perceived as white males.
The study offered plenty of surprises. African-Americans received the highest percentage of responses in the San Francisco-East Bay area and the Central Valley; they received the lowest in Silicon Valley. Latinos received the highest rate of responses statewide — even more than whites.
Arab-Americans and South Asians were the last to get responses everywhere, except Silicon Valley and San Diego, Trasviña said. Locally, he credits the higher concentration of South Asians in Fremont and Silicon Valley — with a probable higher concentration of South Asian employers or those familiar with South Asians, particularly the companies that are using temp agencies.
But, there is cause for SOME hope:
Time was, a name like “Arnold Schwarzenegger” wasn’t likely to launch a successful movie career. Probably not, say, in an America fighting World War II. But it worked in the 1970s for the same reasons you’ll find exceptions to the rule everywhere in life: uncommon drive, luck and a certain something.
The rest of us make our decisions based on more prosaic concerns: getting a job, avoiding as many problems as we can. Especially now.
How we navigate that pursuit is as personal as our name.
Lucky for Sepia Mutiny readers, Aheebeshek Trybathy did have some luck and a certain something to land him this gig.
This is based on a similar earlier MIT study which sent out the same resume with black and white names and found that there was a clear and statistically significant difference in response rates (Employers were uninterested in Tawana, but they were interested in Terri).
It was a very nicely structured experiment that managed to control for many of the confounding factors.
This is based on a similar earlier MIT study which sent out the same resume with black and white names and found that there was a clear and statistically significant difference in response rates
Yup, Marianne Bertrand of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business and Sendhil Mullainathan of MIT. The paper can be downloaded here. Anyway, while discrimination is awful, I have a hunch that S.Asian/E.Asians/Blacks/Arabs/Latinos are far more likely to discriminate against Whites, as well as other minorities, than Whites are likely to discriminate against them.
The “Berkeley Discrimination Center”, huh? Seems like the institute is out to affirm the consequent…
Guess this horrific discrimination explains why East Asians, South Asians, and Arabs have incomes significantly higher than the national average.
oh, wait a sec…. 🙂
by the way, the bertrand and mullainathan study lacked some rudimentary controls in their rush to blame whites…truly pathetic coming from MIT.
missing controls:
1) checking what black employers did to white applicants. I’d bet black employers practiced discrimination as well, probably in favor of blacks (though it’s an empirical question).
2) including east asians in the applicant pool. They didn’t control for the affirmative action effect, which makes a black & a white with equal paper credentials (say, a CS degree from State U) unequal in the real world b/c the black had to pass a lower threshold (e.g. in terms of SAT scores) to get that credential.
That discounting effect wasn’t included…but would have been controlled for had East Asians been included.
Gotta read this study in full, but while they seem to have done the 2nd control, they haven’t done the first.
Guess this horrific discrimination explains why East Asians, South Asians, and Arabs have incomes significantly higher than the national average.
Yeah, but that by itself doesn’t imply an absence of discrimination. You also need to control for education levels for it to be meaningful. Consider the UK where Indians have higher education levels than Whites, yet rake in less than their White counterparts. And we aren’t talking about unassimilated brown hordes here, but mainly second/third generation desis.
GC:
Looking at what black employers did to white applicants is a different question. They sent the resumes to large corporate employers, but didn’t try to spin them to ones with black CEOs or white CEOs, so your first point is off base.
Your second, I grant a bit, but not entirely. Much of that should be controlled away by the pattern of achievement on the resume. AA gets you in the door, but it doesn’t do the work for you.
Also, given the numbers involved, which were large but not huge, the statistics were clearer with a 2-way split.
They were hardly in a rush to blame whites — they had a neat experiment designed to ask a question. I heard them on the radio — they were surprised by the results, and were agnostic about what they meant.
AA gets you in the door, but it doesn’t do the work for you.
AA/racial preferences means 200 points on the SAT, as both the released scores at UMich + the data in Bowen and Bok’s book reveals.
In fact, racial preferences are more than that…because they also impact admissions to grad school as well as job hires (b/c of constant EEOC lawsuit threats). It is not as if the only racial preference is at the gate to undergrad. Instead, racial preferences are active at every level of academia.
In other words, racial preferences are equivalent in effect to race-norming the grade distribution in undergrad, as they impact grad admissions as well as all hires out of undergrad and beyond. Ever read “Diversity Inc.”?
It couldn’t be otherwise if you wanted to maintain the rickety illusion of h-bd denial – the first real merit threshold would cause step-function drop off in “diversity” (= non-underrepresented minority presence).
The only reason AA can survive is because all the quantitative metrics are intentionally kept secret. For ex. on the Berkeley website, you can get all kinds of breakdowns of the undergrad populatoin on geographic distro, ethnicity, gender, SAT scores, etc….including SAT scores by gender.
But they’ve kept SAT scores by ethnicity off the website or buried it somewhere…though it would clearly be trivial to tabulate given the relational db that they surely have set up behind the scenes.
Bottom line: you are fooling yourself if you think Harvard or MIT would be even 10% “underrepresented minority” without racial preferences. You can do the calculation using SAT score distro as a proxy. If the admitted blacks and Hispanics were forced to have SATs comparable to the rest of the class, their combined proportion would be around 1%. See here. Do you seriously deny this? I would suggest checking the ETS score distros first, and then comparing it to the US News reported median SAT scores before challenging this, b/c it is pretty easy to show…
They were hardly in a rush to blame whites — they had a neat experiment designed to ask a question.
Their experiment wasn’t “neat”…it lacked basic controls. And they set up the study with the following tacit assumptions:
racism = irrational hatred, rather than rational statistical discrimination on a hidden variable (e.g. SAT scores) using race as an imperfect proxy (thereby giving the false impression that “racism” means employer reactions to blacks & East Asian resumes will be the same).
Only whites can be racist.
And let’s just say that peer review is just a TAD more lax for the latest bogus discrimination study (whether it be stereotype threat, post-traumatic slavery disorder, or name-bias) than it is for any kind of study on IQ.
Suddenly MRI measurements of brains and correlations of .7 become controversial when you talk about IQ…yet the sort of uncontrolled rubbish that Bertrand and Mullanaithan published gets a credulous rave in the WSJ. Oh well…the days of h-bd denial are numbered anyway…you just can’t deny base pairs and brain scans.
Consider the UK where Indians have higher education levels than Whites, yet rake in less than their White counterparts.
That is not true:
http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/sprN48.asp
That is not true
Err, not really. My point still stands. Go through this paper if you want to get a clearer idea of what the British labor market is like. Average earnings of Male full-timers per week: Whites – 331 pounds, Indians – 317 pounds. Reason : In a nutshell, Indians have larger families with a higher proportion of working-age members. That’s why “Chinese and Indian working families averaged slightly higher earnings than white people” .
Also, look up Chart 1.3: Average weekly earnings of full-time men and women employees. Both Indian males as well as Indian females earn less than their White counterparts.
GC:
You astound me sometimes. In science you don’t make up an experiment to study “evolution” or “relativity”, you make up a study to examine one of the observable implications of that theory.
They weren’t studying racism (which is a large topic), they were looking at whether there was discimination in hiring, particularly at the early phase. For this reason, they sent resumes to the large companies. They never denied that there might be racism by blacks. There might be racism by Inuit also, but it doesn’t have much of an affect on the job market outside of small villages in Alaska.
Secondly, you’re probably the only person who would hire based solely on SAT scores. Most employers hire based on experience. If that’s true, then the thing to control for would be experience in the resume. It would have been easy enough for them to add an SAT score into the resume, but that would have looked strange, since most employers don’t ask for it, and it would have introduced a difference between experimental resumes and the rest of the resumes being received.
Even if somebody was admitted under AA, as I said, that gets them in the door, that doesn’t account for their performance. I haven’t seen the sample resumes, but most of the accomplishments on an average resume are things like exceeded sales quota 3 years running. That has nothing to do with AA.
(You’re also presuming that there are no quotas for white folks either. While usually smaller, some universities reserve up to 25% of their pool for legacy admits. Similarly, geographical diversity clearly benefits white folks. A student from Idaho or Montana can have a much lower SAT than a student in San Fransisco, and still get into MIT or Stanford. If you control of income as well, the gap isn’t as large as you’re making it seem. Personally, I’d be suspicious of people with waspy names with numbers after them. Trustafarians are very lazy.)
I know that you think that SATs proxy for intelligence, and that intelligence determines job prospects and economic growth on a national level.
However, I’ve tought SAT test prep. The company I worked for guaranteed a minimum 100 point improvement (this was on the old test), and I personally saw a reasonable number of students go up 200-300 points just by learning how to take the test and some very targetted studying. That would make it a poor proxy for intelligence, even assuming that all intelligence can be compressed into a single dimension.