5 ms·
I'm a black guy working in IT at a company in the top 5 of the Fortune 500. This is complicated issue. There have been experiment that show having a "black" nam
by alistproducer2 11y ago
I'm a black guy working in IT at a company in the top 5 of the Fortune 500. This is complicated issue. There have been experiment that show having a "black" name lowers your job prospects [1]. Other studies that show:
"...race actually turned out to be more significant than a criminal background. Notice that employers were more likely to call Whites with a criminal record (17% were offered an interview) than Blacks without a criminal record (14%). [2]"
So all the people acting as though our society is some meritocratic, utopia can keep that bullsh*t to themselves.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that blacks under-perform relative to whites when it comes to academics. There are obvious reason for this, but those reasons don't change the truth. Companies that are heavy on the engineering are going to use academic markers to try and select the best of the best. There aren't enough blacks >= white peers in the top percentiles of CS to give us proportional representation.
[1] http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
[2] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/04/03/race-criminal-background-and-employment/ http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/04/03/race-crimina...
- ebfe 11y agoThe first study confounds the issues of race and class. Emily is not the white equivalent to Lakisha, Brandi is.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pmorici 11y agoThe op said that Brandi was a name for low class white people I think you misunderstood what he said.
- dingbat 11y agofurther complicated by the tendency towards aspirational naming, as over time formerly upscale names like Emily / Alexandra / Madison etc become associated with low-end socioeconomics due to overexposure. however, you'd have to be willfully ignorant to deny the perceptual gap between high-end/low-end Emily/Amber vs. Lakisha
- kenjackson 11y agoSo what is a "high-end" black name?
- gohrt 11y agoThe richest black Americans are named: Oprah, Michael, Tiger, Sean, Robert, Mariah, Earvin, Jay, Bill, Sheila, Tyler, Shaquille, Dr, Master, Berry, Russell, Quintin, Beyonce, Prince. The richest Americans are named: Bill, Warren, Larry, Jeff, Charles, David, Mark, Michael, Jim, Larry, Sergey (immigrant, didn't change name), Alice (inherited), S. Robson (inherited) Christy (inherited), Sheldon, George, Phil, Forrest, Jacqueline, John, Steve, Carl. Bill and Michael are on both those lists, but you would not say they are "black" names. The thing is, there aren't a large group of upper class black people with different names from upper class white people, so you don't have an image in your mind of high-end black names. The rich and famous black people you know have either normal "white" names or very rare names (Beyonce, Prince, Tiger). High-end names default to looking white, since white is "normal" in USA.
- drstrangevibes 11y agoso you take the outliers as some indication of the median?
- uncletaco 11y agoBy Dr. do you mean Andre and by Master do you mean Percy?
- Grishnakh 11y agoDon't forget also that for many of those black names, those people are celebrities and sports stars: they don't have to worry about getting a job interview at some soulless corporation. Beyonce, Oprah, Shaquille, etc. made their millions in the entertainment business and likely never had to deal with that. However, someone sending in a resume with the name "Shaquille" for a programming job isn't going to get a pass just because he shares a name with a basketball legend; he'll be subject to whatever bias about black people the resume screener has.
- toomanybeersies 11y agoSounds like a good solution is to strip names from CVs when reviewing them. People are fallible, and often racist/sexist/discriminatory in general, even subconsciously. I wonder if this effect is the same with black recruiters, or if it goes the opposite way. It's very much normal for people to favour people similar to them, by race, gender, religion, etc.
- abecedarius 11y agoThe Recurse Center does this with their applications -- they substitute randomly-generated names like Spandex Reindeer. Great idea.
- wkimeria 11y agoI don't think the effect goes the other way (a lot of people habor anti-black unconscious bias, even black people). Re anonymizing the names, I think there are a bunch of startup companies that provide such a service (i.e. https://www.gapjumpers.me/ https://www.gapjumpers.me/ ). It has been shown to make a difference but it is not always practical
- jorgecurio 11y agowhat has your experience been like?
- alistproducer2 11y agoI was contacted to interview with Google but didn't b/c I don't want to live in California. Despite having a distinctly "black" sounding name, I've never had trouble finding work in IT or at all for that matter. I'm split b/c on the one hand I know society is not meritocratic, but I don't feel that I have personally been hamstrung by my race.