8 ms·

The conclusion from this little study, is that a girl with an italian name, gets an 90% answer rate, a guy with an arab name and is younger than 25 gets, 1% ans

The conclusion from this little study, is that a girl with an italian name, gets an 90% answer rate, a guy with an arab name and is younger than 25 gets, 1% answer rate. The master of all, is the young munich guy who is around 25 Sadly, this doesn't surprise me. Across Europe, numerous anti-discrimination laws have been (rightfully) enacted, but it just pushes any inclination to discriminate that might exist into private. Oh, we "didn't receive" your e-mail, or oh, I "didn't see" your résumé.. This is why some people got upset about Google+ demanding real names and similar "use your real name" policies elsewhere, as even a name alone can be a huge trigger for discriminatory behavior.

twobits 12y ago
This won't be popular, but "discrimination" can be for good reasons and for bad reasons.
philangist 12y ago
I've noticed something similar here in NYC as I've been apartment hunting. There are postings that will ask for a link to your facebook/instagram/twitter before they'll even show you the property. I'm not saying that it's always motivated by discriminatory behavior, but if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck...
ilovefood 12y ago
Thanks for the input ! Maybe I should try it with jobs, just for a test, and write an article about it. :)
- praptak 12y ago
  Such tests have been performed: "Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback" http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html I believe I have read a study (can't dig it up) where a simple switch to a female name in the context of a technical job made the response rate drop.
  - Maxious 12y ago
    BuzzFeed has the story of a guy named José who could not get callbacks until he changed the name on his resume to Joe http://www.buzzfeed.com/adriancarrasquillo/meet-jose-zamora-the-guy-who-changed-his-name-to-joe-to-get/ http://www.buzzfeed.com/adriancarrasquillo/meet-jose-zamora-...
    - richthegeek 12y ago
      Whilst there is no reason to disbelieve the core tenet of this article (white guys have better chances than hispanic guys in that region), the extreme hyperbole employed doesn't help the message. Months without any replies (like, 0.1% response rate) turned into a 90% response rate due to just a name change is difficult to believe and doesn't jibe with other more stringent research.
      - MadManE 12y ago
        While hard to believe, it is still true. I graduated with a BSME from Nebraska, and my first name is Earle. I went for ~3 months without any responses to resumes or applications, until I added my middle name. I started working a new job within two weeks, and now have to go by my middle name at work. All because "Earle from Nebraska" must be a redneck hick. My case is almost certainly not racially motivated, but literally the only change I made was my name.
        beachstartup 12y ago
        it's not race, it's culture - which usually involves race, but not always, in your case. change your name to 'bubba' or 'cletus' and try to land some interviews with a company based in the northeast. i'm an asian guy with an ultra generic anglo first and last name and i've never really had any trouble getting interviews. in fact when i show up and i'm asian they usually have a nice little chuckle and are pleasantly surprised. generally asians in technology at the worker-level don't get discriminated against unless they have thick accents (which i don't). i've seen resumes with asian first/last names that have a note under the name that says "natural born US citizen, authorized to work anywhere in the US and territories" or something to that effect. it's a good thing, in my opinion. it signals multiple things in one neat little sentence.
- macca321 12y ago
  Just write an article about it :)
gambiting 12y ago
I think it has more to do with age than to do with origin. When I was looking for a place in the UK after getting my first job and earning decent money I was straight up told by an agency that many landlords wouldn't even consider me because I was "too young to rent a house", even though I had the money for it. Age discrimination is perfectly legal everywhere(apart from job interviews maybe) - think car insurance - so it's very easily used as an excuse for everything. I also think that's wrong.
- lets_go_surfing 12y ago
  That was the case for me as well, back when I moved to Munich in 2012. It also helps if you speak at least some German(I didn't), and send emails in German(just ask some colleague or friend to fill it for you). Also, in the end(it took me roughly 3 months to find apartment) I just had a stack of papers which basically would tell everything about me. I dunno if it helps, but I have heard Germans like bureaucracy.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  > Age discrimination is perfectly legal everywhere It's protected alongside the statuses of disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation, to more-or-less the same extent in theory. There are, however, glaring exceptions when it comes to housing (due to how this protection intersects with property rights), as housing agency industry groups, housing charities, and various other charities explain across the Internet.
  - gambiting 12y ago
    I think the most glaring omission is car insurance - if you enquire about insurance you will be straight up told that because you are under 25, the premium is going to be 4x of what it would be normally. No-one bats an eyelid at that - statistics prove that young drivers crash more, so it's all fine, right?? Funnily enough, statistically men crash more than women too - but it's illegal to charge men more, because that would be gender discrimination. It's also illegal to charge someone more for insurance because they are black, christian, or a vegetarian - regardless of how many accidents members of those groups get into. And yet if you are 24, have been driving more than 6 years without an accident, you will still pay more than someone who is 25 and has passed their exam last week. If that is not discrimination then I have absolutely no idea what is.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sauere 12y ago
Anti-discrimination laws do not solve any problems, they make them worse. If someone is not willing to hire a person because of their ethnicity/color/sex/age/whatever, a law will not make him do it. Finding an excuse is too easy and it is basically impossible to prove such things in court. I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzXXvUjg8Fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzXXvUjg8Fo
- gabzuka 12y ago
  I'm getting a "video does not exist" on that link.
  - sauere 12y ago
    fixed
- Folcon 12y ago
  Your video isn't viewable.
- netcan 12y ago
  I really dislike this mentality. I think it's counterproductive, and I hope you change your mind. Laws play their role. Sometimes they walk fine lines between usefulness, uselessness and harmfulness, but they are not unequivocally useless in all such cases. Consider the gay awakening. When I was in high school the world was a qualitatively different place for homosexuals. A worse place. The axis around which culture has pivoted on this and other issues, is difficult to name. But, an important part of it is just defining, explaining, defending (and sometimes even legislating) what is by our standards an asshole position. If you are so hung up on the idea that men are shagging each other in this world that it affects how you interact with people, you are an asshole. Society says so. To this day, many non assholes are uncomfortable with gays. Maybe it's conservatism, cultural habit, latent homosexuality, whatever. But, if you're talking to an intelligent young person chances are they'll think of you as a crazy asshole if you start making fidgety mean statements about gays. That's the cultural change and it's a powerful force. Legislation is a part of that. Perfectly enforceable or not, it allows an avenue for enforcement of blatant cases and formalizes the moral position of our time. Thou shall not be a crazy asshole that gets bent out of shape around the idea of a gay neighbor. Legislation's role in this is sometime minor, sometimes major and sometimes ineffective. I have no illusions about what legislation can achieve without the winds of change at its back. But, there is such a thing as our society.
mhd 12y ago
There's certainly a good amount of racism in Munich (it's really best for a lot of people that you can't understand most drunks around here), and realtors generally aren't the creme of the crop of basic goodness anyway. But I think a part of it comes down to a higher chance of young people with Arab names either being students (short-term, prone to be loud and messy no matter where they're from) or more likely to bring in additional residents. And most landlord's I've known would prefer if nobody would live at all in the apartment at all... I don't think 25-year old "Hanz" would be the prime candidate for successes, try faking a 40-something with a job for BMW/Siemens (directly, no freelance/contract) who only needs it to sleep during the weekdays and drives home to his Stuttgart home for the weekends.
- philangist 12y ago
  Well I'm sure that age has something to do with it, but a 1% response rate is so ridiculously low that you can't just explain that away with age. I'm sure that under 25 german males are not getting responses 1% of the time.
  - mhd 12y ago
    Where did I explain it away with age? I said students & more likelihood of families. Sure, this is profiling, and thus still on the racism spectrum, but maybe not entirely in the deep brown sector. Of which there is a lot, too, of course. This is Munich, which has a much sadder 9th of November than Berlin.
stef25 12y ago
Can you use the law to punish someone for not responding to an email from 21 year old Mohammed asking if he can rent your apartment? Renting out an apartment can lead to some very difficult situations (basically because the law isn't going to help you get out of them). Everyone I know that rents out properties here in Belgium applies a very strict filter when selecting tenants; I would do the same and not feel bad about it for a second.
- rmc 12y ago
  Can you use the law to punish someone for not responding to an email from 21 year old Mohammed asking if he can rent your apartment? Yes. If you will not rent out your apartment to someone based on their ethnicity/race, that's illegal. If you don't like it, get out of the apartment rental business. It's just so hard to prosecute people for it.
  - stef25 12y ago
    Realistically nobody would know if you're using ethnicity as the basis of your decision right?
    - lafar6502 12y ago
      ... but certainly someone could accuse you of being a racist because you didn't rent to them. So it's quite natural you as a landlord would prefer to have only candidates of same race and same nationality (not difficult at all, just don't respond to anyone with a foreign name) Try forcing more 'anti-discrimination' laws and people will rather keep the appartment unoccupied than risk being taken to court
    - rmc 12y ago
      In some regions (e.g. EU) ethnicity is defined as the same thing as race for anti-discrimination law.
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
Anti-discrimination laws just mean people get punished for openly discriminating; it doesn't change the culture, at least not until the law slowly turns into a societal norm. Which, for some people or societies, just won't happen in this generation.
hessenwolf 12y ago
I have been stupid enough to be devastated twice when an Italian named Andrea arrived to the meeting.

twobits 12y ago

This won't be popular, but "discrimination" can be for good reasons and for bad reasons.

philangist 12y ago

I've noticed something similar here in NYC as I've been apartment hunting. There are postings that will ask for a link to your facebook/instagram/twitter before they'll even show you the property. I'm not saying that it's always motivated by discriminatory behavior, but if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck...

ilovefood 12y ago

Thanks for the input ! Maybe I should try it with jobs, just for a test, and write an article about it. :)

praptak 12y ago
Such tests have been performed: "Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback" http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html I believe I have read a study (can't dig it up) where a simple switch to a female name in the context of a technical job made the response rate drop.
- Maxious 12y ago
  BuzzFeed has the story of a guy named José who could not get callbacks until he changed the name on his resume to Joe http://www.buzzfeed.com/adriancarrasquillo/meet-jose-zamora-the-guy-who-changed-his-name-to-joe-to-get/ http://www.buzzfeed.com/adriancarrasquillo/meet-jose-zamora-...
  - richthegeek 12y ago
    Whilst there is no reason to disbelieve the core tenet of this article (white guys have better chances than hispanic guys in that region), the extreme hyperbole employed doesn't help the message. Months without any replies (like, 0.1% response rate) turned into a 90% response rate due to just a name change is difficult to believe and doesn't jibe with other more stringent research.
    - MadManE 12y ago
      While hard to believe, it is still true. I graduated with a BSME from Nebraska, and my first name is Earle. I went for ~3 months without any responses to resumes or applications, until I added my middle name. I started working a new job within two weeks, and now have to go by my middle name at work. All because "Earle from Nebraska" must be a redneck hick. My case is almost certainly not racially motivated, but literally the only change I made was my name.
      - beachstartup 12y ago
        it's not race, it's culture - which usually involves race, but not always, in your case. change your name to 'bubba' or 'cletus' and try to land some interviews with a company based in the northeast. i'm an asian guy with an ultra generic anglo first and last name and i've never really had any trouble getting interviews. in fact when i show up and i'm asian they usually have a nice little chuckle and are pleasantly surprised. generally asians in technology at the worker-level don't get discriminated against unless they have thick accents (which i don't). i've seen resumes with asian first/last names that have a note under the name that says "natural born US citizen, authorized to work anywhere in the US and territories" or something to that effect. it's a good thing, in my opinion. it signals multiple things in one neat little sentence.
macca321 12y ago
Just write an article about it :)

gambiting 12y ago

I think it has more to do with age than to do with origin. When I was looking for a place in the UK after getting my first job and earning decent money I was straight up told by an agency that many landlords wouldn't even consider me because I was "too young to rent a house", even though I had the money for it. Age discrimination is perfectly legal everywhere(apart from job interviews maybe) - think car insurance - so it's very easily used as an excuse for everything. I also think that's wrong.

lets_go_surfing 12y ago
That was the case for me as well, back when I moved to Munich in 2012. It also helps if you speak at least some German(I didn't), and send emails in German(just ask some colleague or friend to fill it for you). Also, in the end(it took me roughly 3 months to find apartment) I just had a stack of papers which basically would tell everything about me. I dunno if it helps, but I have heard Germans like bureaucracy.
vertex-four 12y ago
> Age discrimination is perfectly legal everywhere It's protected alongside the statuses of disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation, to more-or-less the same extent in theory. There are, however, glaring exceptions when it comes to housing (due to how this protection intersects with property rights), as housing agency industry groups, housing charities, and various other charities explain across the Internet.
- gambiting 12y ago
  I think the most glaring omission is car insurance - if you enquire about insurance you will be straight up told that because you are under 25, the premium is going to be 4x of what it would be normally. No-one bats an eyelid at that - statistics prove that young drivers crash more, so it's all fine, right?? Funnily enough, statistically men crash more than women too - but it's illegal to charge men more, because that would be gender discrimination. It's also illegal to charge someone more for insurance because they are black, christian, or a vegetarian - regardless of how many accidents members of those groups get into. And yet if you are 24, have been driving more than 6 years without an accident, you will still pay more than someone who is 25 and has passed their exam last week. If that is not discrimination then I have absolutely no idea what is.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

sauere 12y ago

Anti-discrimination laws do not solve any problems, they make them worse. If someone is not willing to hire a person because of their ethnicity/color/sex/age/whatever, a law will not make him do it. Finding an excuse is too easy and it is basically impossible to prove such things in court. I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzXXvUjg8Fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzXXvUjg8Fo

gabzuka 12y ago
I'm getting a "video does not exist" on that link.
- sauere 12y ago
  fixed
Folcon 12y ago
Your video isn't viewable.
netcan 12y ago
I really dislike this mentality. I think it's counterproductive, and I hope you change your mind. Laws play their role. Sometimes they walk fine lines between usefulness, uselessness and harmfulness, but they are not unequivocally useless in all such cases. Consider the gay awakening. When I was in high school the world was a qualitatively different place for homosexuals. A worse place. The axis around which culture has pivoted on this and other issues, is difficult to name. But, an important part of it is just defining, explaining, defending (and sometimes even legislating) what is by our standards an asshole position. If you are so hung up on the idea that men are shagging each other in this world that it affects how you interact with people, you are an asshole. Society says so. To this day, many non assholes are uncomfortable with gays. Maybe it's conservatism, cultural habit, latent homosexuality, whatever. But, if you're talking to an intelligent young person chances are they'll think of you as a crazy asshole if you start making fidgety mean statements about gays. That's the cultural change and it's a powerful force. Legislation is a part of that. Perfectly enforceable or not, it allows an avenue for enforcement of blatant cases and formalizes the moral position of our time. Thou shall not be a crazy asshole that gets bent out of shape around the idea of a gay neighbor. Legislation's role in this is sometime minor, sometimes major and sometimes ineffective. I have no illusions about what legislation can achieve without the winds of change at its back. But, there is such a thing as our society.

mhd 12y ago

There's certainly a good amount of racism in Munich (it's really best for a lot of people that you can't understand most drunks around here), and realtors generally aren't the creme of the crop of basic goodness anyway. But I think a part of it comes down to a higher chance of young people with Arab names either being students (short-term, prone to be loud and messy no matter where they're from) or more likely to bring in additional residents. And most landlord's I've known would prefer if nobody would live at all in the apartment at all... I don't think 25-year old "Hanz" would be the prime candidate for successes, try faking a 40-something with a job for BMW/Siemens (directly, no freelance/contract) who only needs it to sleep during the weekdays and drives home to his Stuttgart home for the weekends.

philangist 12y ago
Well I'm sure that age has something to do with it, but a 1% response rate is so ridiculously low that you can't just explain that away with age. I'm sure that under 25 german males are not getting responses 1% of the time.
- mhd 12y ago
  Where did I explain it away with age? I said students & more likelihood of families. Sure, this is profiling, and thus still on the racism spectrum, but maybe not entirely in the deep brown sector. Of which there is a lot, too, of course. This is Munich, which has a much sadder 9th of November than Berlin.

stef25 12y ago

Can you use the law to punish someone for not responding to an email from 21 year old Mohammed asking if he can rent your apartment? Renting out an apartment can lead to some very difficult situations (basically because the law isn't going to help you get out of them). Everyone I know that rents out properties here in Belgium applies a very strict filter when selecting tenants; I would do the same and not feel bad about it for a second.

rmc 12y ago
Can you use the law to punish someone for not responding to an email from 21 year old Mohammed asking if he can rent your apartment? Yes. If you will not rent out your apartment to someone based on their ethnicity/race, that's illegal. If you don't like it, get out of the apartment rental business. It's just so hard to prosecute people for it.
- stef25 12y ago
  Realistically nobody would know if you're using ethnicity as the basis of your decision right?
  - lafar6502 12y ago
    ... but certainly someone could accuse you of being a racist because you didn't rent to them. So it's quite natural you as a landlord would prefer to have only candidates of same race and same nationality (not difficult at all, just don't respond to anyone with a foreign name) Try forcing more 'anti-discrimination' laws and people will rather keep the appartment unoccupied than risk being taken to court
  - rmc 12y ago
    In some regions (e.g. EU) ethnicity is defined as the same thing as race for anti-discrimination law.

Cthulhu_ 12y ago

Anti-discrimination laws just mean people get punished for openly discriminating; it doesn't change the culture, at least not until the law slowly turns into a societal norm. Which, for some people or societies, just won't happen in this generation.

hessenwolf 12y ago

I have been stupid enough to be devastated twice when an Italian named Andrea arrived to the meeting.