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As is often quoted, resumes with black-sounding names get far fewer calls for interviews than resumes with white-sounding names. That is an oft-cited conclusio
by rando123 10y ago
As is often quoted, resumes with black-sounding names get far fewer calls for interviews than resumes with white-sounding names.
That is an oft-cited conclusion from an old study that has not been reproduced in the tech industry (the classic one is http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873, a 2003 study in Boston and Chicago where they submitted resumes based on newspaper ads), where there is a devastating lack of supply and vicious competition for minority candidates.
Someone should repro this in tech, though, it would be quite useful to know how things look here and now!
- wpietri 10y ago> where there is a devastating lack of supply and vicious competition for minority candidates My guess is that if this is true at all, it's true only for a relatively small number of prominent companies, and that it has only recently become true. There's certainly a lot of public discussion, but I suspect it only weakly correlates with private discussion at most tech companies, and that in turn weakly correlates with actual action. Like you, I'd like to see it reproduced. A few years back, when bias-denial was more entrenched, I paid a researcher a few thousand dollars to look at reproducing it. It's certainly doable, but there are a number of challenges, and ultimately I decided it wouldn't move the discussion forward as much as I hoped; the denialists and the foot-draggers would just pick nits or find something else to use as a shield. And the people who understand the problem don't really need more proof. But if you (or anybody (or a coalition of anybodies)) would like to drop $20-50k on doing a tech-specific version of this, drop me a line and I can put you in touch with researchers and share my notes.