Perhaps
someone can explain to me the distinction made in this article about
taste-based discrimination and statistical discrimination affecting a business’
bottom line? Karen Watters Cole What's in a Name? Perhaps
Plenty if You're a Job Seeker
By Alan B. Krueger, NYT, 12.12.02 @ http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/business/12SCEN.html WHAT'S in a name? Evidently plenty if you are looking for a
job. To test whether employers discriminate against black job
applicants, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil
Mullainathan of M.I.T. conducted an unusual experiment. They selected 1,300
help-wanted ads from newspapers in Boston and Chicago and submitted multiple
résumés from phantom job seekers. The researchers randomly assigned the first
names on the résumés, choosing from one set that is particularly common among
blacks and from another that is common among whites. So Kristen and Tamika, and Brad and Tyrone, applied for jobs
from the same pool of want ads and had equivalent résumés. Nine names were selected to represent each
category: black women, white women, black men and white men. Last names common to the racial group were also assigned. Four résumés were typically submitted
for each job opening, drawn from a reservoir of 160. Nearly
5,000 applications were submitted from mid-2001 to mid-2002. Professors Bertrand and Mullainathan
kept track of which candidates were invited for job interviews. No single employer was sent two identical résumés, and the
names on the résumés were randomly assigned, so applicants with black- and
white-sounding names applied for the same set of jobs with the same set of
résumés. Apart from their names, applicants had the
same experience, education and skills, so employers had no reason to
distinguish among them. The results are disturbing. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more
likely to be called for interviews than were those with black-sounding names. Interviews were requested for 10.1
percent of applicants with white-sounding names and only 6.7 percent of those
with black-sounding names. Within
racial groups, applications with men's or women's names were equally likely to
result in calls for interviews, providing little evidence of discrimination
based on sex in these entry-level jobs. There were significant differences in interview-request
rates among the nine names associated with black women, but not among the names
within each of the other groups. At
the low end, the interview-request rate was 2.2 percent for Aisha, 3.8 percent
for Keisha and 5.4 percent for Tamika, compared with 9.1 percent for Kenya and
Latonya and 10.5 percent for Ebony. Only part of this variability reflects chance differences
resulting from sampling, although the authors have not been able to find a good
explanation for the wide range.
Thus it is important that the names chosen for black women were not
uncommon; they represent 7.1 percent of all names listed on Massachusetts birth
certificates for black girls from 1974 to 1979. The 50 percent advantage in interview requests for
white-sounding names held in both Boston and Chicago, and for both men and women.
This discrepancy complements findings from earlier studies in which
researchers sent a small number of matched black and white "auditors"
to apply for jobs in person.
Typically, though not always, the black job seekers were less likely to
be invited for an interview or offered a job. Those findings, however, were criticized because the
applicants knew the intention of the study and might have behaved
differently. In addition, the
auditors might not have been well matched with the jobs in question; they could
have been overqualified or underqualified. Professors Bertrand and Mullainathan's study is less
susceptible to these concerns. First, they used a large number of names
and inanimate résumés. Second, the job openings involved administrative, sales,
clerical and managerial positions, and they submitted
résumés patterned after real résumés of people who were actually seeking
similar jobs. Their most alarming finding is that the likelihood of being
called for an interview rises sharply with an applicant's credentials — like
experience and honors — for those with white-sounding names, but much less for
those with black-sounding names. A grave concern is that this phenomenon
may be damping the incentives for blacks to acquire job skills, producing a self-fulfilling
prophecy that perpetuates prejudice and misallocates resources. Two main theories explain labor market discrimination. One, known as taste-based discrimination, posits that employers — or customers,
co-workers or supervisors — have a preference against hiring minority
applicants, even if they know they are equally productive. The other, known as statistical discrimination, assumes that employers personally harbor no
racial animus but cannot perfectly predict workers' productivity. In this case, an employer assessing an
applicant would assign
some weight to the average performance of the person's racial group, instead of
basing the judgment solely on the individual's merits. A difference between these models is that employers sacrifice profits to indulge in
taste-based discrimination,
while, in principle,
statistical discrimination, if based on accurate information, can help the
bottom line. Professors Bertrand and Mullainathan
cannot distinguish between the models — and both may be applicable — but they
suspect that their finding that employers in heavily black areas of Chicago are
less likely to discriminate against black-sounding names augurs for taste-based
discrimination. Nevertheless, either rationale for discrimination is illegal
and prohibited. "That which
we call a rose," Juliet said, "by any other name would smell as
sweet." An organization like the Civil Rights Commission or the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission could perform a service if it routinely
monitored discrimination by conducting audit studies similar to Professors
Bertrand and Mullainathan's. Outgoing Mail Scanned by NAV 2002 |