7 ms·
Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers [pdf]
- fighterpilot 5y agoIs 2.1 percent large or small? For example, is it 50.0 vs 52.1 percent (and thus marginal), or 1.0 vs 3.1 percent (and thus massive)?
- chairmanwow1 5y agofrom the paper: >> "an effect equal to 9% of the Black mean contact rate"
- hbrav 5y agoIn the main body of the paper they say "We find that distinctively Black names reduce the likelihood of employer contact relative to distinctively white names by 2.1 percentage points, an effect equal to 9% of the Black mean contact rate". I think we take that to mean that it's an absolute 2.1% reduction, and if it's also 9% relative reduction, then that would have black applicants getting a response 23.3% of the time, and white applicants 25.4%.
- rewq4321 5y agoIt's 2.1 percentage points which they say is about a 9% difference.
- CheezeIt 5y agoIt’s 25.1% vs. 23.0% response rates. Table 1.
- yarky 5y agoStatistically speaking, it could be a due to randomness, but that depends on the test statistics. I'd check the maths if I had any doubt about the conclusion ;)
- phnofive 5y agoAbstract: "We study the results of a massive nationwide correspondence experiment sending more than 83,000 fictitious applications with randomized characteristics to geographically dispersed jobs posted by 108 of the largest U.S. employers. Distinctively Black names reduce the probability of employer contact by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively white names. The magnitude of this racial gap in contact rates differs substantially across firms, exhibiting a between-company standard deviation of 1.9 percentage points. Despite an insignificant average gap in contact rates between male and female applicants, we find a between-company standard deviation in gender contact gaps of 2.7 percentage points, revealing that some firms favor male applicants while others favor women. Company-specific racial contact gaps are temporally and spatially persistent, and negatively correlated with firm profitability, federal contractor status, and a measure of recruiting centralization. Discrimination exhibits little geographical dispersion, but two digit industry explains roughly half of the cross-firm variation in both racial and gender contact gaps. Contact gaps are highly concentrated in particular companies, with firms in the top quintile of racial discrimination responsible for nearly half of lost contacts to Black applicants in the experiment. Controlling false discovery rates to the 5% level, 23 individual companies are found to discriminate against Black applicants. [See Appendix] Our findings establish that systemic illegal discrimination is concentrated among a select set of large employers, many of which can be identified with high confidence using large scale inference methods."
- phnofive 5y agoWould have been nice to see the stats for the twenty-three clear offenders up top (p. 66) - still trying to figure it out now. I'm open to being convinced that Census data for racially associated names is common knowledge among recruiters, but I'm not there yet.
- nerdponx 5y agoI suspect that you could predict the "Blackness" of a name using character n-grams, with reasonable accuracy. Not to mention given+family name combos as mentioned in a sibling comment. You don't need to know the actual Census data for each name.
- endisneigh 5y agoThis isn't really surprising - this sort of thing has been shown for quite a while as the citations showed. I had a friend who happened to be Black and has a very "Black" sounding name tell me that he actually took away his photo on LinkedIn and changed his name and got way more recruiters contacting him (though I've also had similar things said by non-Blacks, so IDK). I actually did not believe him since he's also in the tech industry and didn't think such things would happen for Software Engineers - alas the table at the end (Figure 9) shows a small difference. I wonder why the food product industry has such a huge difference.
- eplanit 5y agoDoes capitalizing "black" compensate, somehow?
- endisneigh 5y agowhat do you mean?
- flowerlad 5y agoFor college admissions it is different: it is Asians that are discriminated against, not African Americans https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-rac... And the way it is done is through "holistic review" process, see: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-false-promise-of-holistic-college-admissions/282432/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa... Excerpt: From colleges’ perspective, “holistic” is just shorthand for, we make the decisions we make, and would rather not be asked to spell out each one. It’s a way for schools to discreetly take various sensitive factors—“overrepresented” minorities, or students whose families might donate a gym—into account.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- endisneigh 5y agohow's college admission discrimination relevant to employer discrimination?
- denkmoon 5y agoNot many jobs going out there that don't require some kind of degree these days. University admission is a necessary step for job acquisition in anything but unskilled labor positions.
- endisneigh 5y agoyeah, but I'm not sure how discrimination at extremely elite schools is relevant to broad sector industry discrimination. don't get me wrong, discrimination is bad, but let's not act as if discrimination in getting into Harvard is in any way comparable to not being able to get a callback at McDonalds because you're black (the food industry had the highest white/black callback discrimination according to Figure 9 in the paper).
- 5y ago
- daenz 5y agoIt seems like they just did "black names" vs "white names." It would be interesting if they tried this with unique "white" names, like "Göran Hägglund" or "Alf Svensson" (picking Swedish names here). It would be interesting to know if the bias is against unique-sounding names or if it is against the inferred race. Also, anyone know if there a reason why "Black" is capitalized in the paper but "white" is not?
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Also, anyone know if there a reason why "Black" is capitalized in the paper but "white" is not? While its not my personal preferred style, the NY Times has recently adopted this style (from an earlier one which capitalized neither) and explains it reasonably well (and other explanations of users of the style have generally been similar, so its what I take as, in outline, the usual explanation): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black...
- bopbeepboop 5y agoIt sounds racist and ill-conceived. If using a small “b” insults the history of the descendants of slaves, does using a small “w” insult the various descendants of abused white populations, like the Irish or Italians or Poles? Their reasoning about “shared history and identity” sounds like gussied up racial essentialism — and implies that recently-African Americans and their children “aren’t black”. I think the NYT is just racist.
- daenz 5y ago>white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has long been capitalized by hate groups. Thanks, and yikes, I had no idea this was a thing. So if I wrote "White" in the same way some might write "Black", people might get the wrong idea? To be honest, this change just seems like more petty ways to divide us.
- chitowneats 5y ago
- Aunche 5y agoThis is tangentially related, but does anyone know how "diversity internships" are legal? For example: https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/step/ https://buildyourfuture.withgoogle.com/programs/step/ > The internship program has a focus of providing development opportunities to students from groups historically underrepresented in tech, through technical training and professional development. This sounds like they blatantly violate the Civil Rights Act. I wonder how much discrimination is caused by people trying to "make up" for affirmative action (not that I think this is ok).
- endisneigh 5y agoyour example doesn't seem to be a great one - which group are you thinking is not represented in the photo?
- Aunche 5y agoI was referring to the quote, but the photograph raises a good point. There is not a single white or Asian male, despite them making up the majority of CS classes.
- endisneigh 5y agoThe image is cropped, open it up in a new tab and you'll see the whole gamut. Also, I'm not sure why you think focusing on "historically underrepresented" groups would be illegal lol.
- Aunche 5y ago> Also, I'm not sure why you think focusing on "historically underrepresented" groups would be illegal lol. Because by "underrepresented groups" they mean race and sex. You'll see far more children of African immigrants than people who graduated from inner city school districts.
- endisneigh 5y ago
- epicureanideal 5y agoThe names they chose seem to be fairly uncommon. Did they correct for the confounding variable of perceived social class of each of the names? (Similar to what someone else said, I wonder if they checked... not for uniqueness, because some names are unique but familiar to other names, but rather for recency of immigration, which can actually have both positive and negative effects I would imagine. For example, someone with a distinctive first + last name combination for a particular place might seem more "interesting" to interview.) Even a change in the presentation of the same name can indicate social class... Bill vs Will vs William, with middle initial or without, etc. Also hyphenated last names. Also, they included so many other things in the resumes... club memberships, etc., it makes me wonder whether the results were influenced by that. Even so, let's say the response is 23% vs 25% by race as they seem to say. That's obviously not good if it's due to racism for example, but it doesn't sound like an absolute prevention from working in an industry.
- pseudalopex 5y agoThey chose last names at least 10,000 people had in the 2010 census. Over 43.6% had a more uncommon last name.[1] And some of the study names were much more common. Which first names seem uncommon to you? Black names are perceived as lower class because they're associated with black people. And education and work history are stronger class signals. Which names do you think sound like immigrants? You looked at the names they used. So you know they didn't use different forms of the same name. Or hyphenated last names. They calculated the effects of each characteristic. They found discrimination against men and women balanced out. They found modest but significant age discrimination. And they found club memberships had no significant effect. Absolute prevention is a straw man. [1] https://www2.census.gov/topics/genealogy/2010surnames/surnames.pdf#page=4 https://www2.census.gov/topics/genealogy/2010surnames/surnam...