Affirmative Action Unnecessary?

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Tough crap. I say pull your self up and stop looking for hand outs and entitlements to get ahead in life. We have created generations of scumbags ...

Scumbag recipe:

Take two job candidates with equivalent qualifications.
One's name should sound "white", the other "black".
Call 50% more candidates with "white" sounding names for an interview than the ones with "black" sounding names.
Bang your head against the wall, if you're black.

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 resumes from� phantom job seekers. The researchers randomly assigned the first names on the resumes, 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 resumes. 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 resumes 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 resumes, and the names on the resumes were randomly assigned, so applicants with black- and white-sounding names applied for the same set of jobs with the same set of resumes.

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.

from here.

[glatt]

"So Kristen and Tamika, and Brad and Tyrone, applied for jobs from the same pool of want ads and had equivalent resumes."

I smell something funny here. What is an "equivalent" resume? They obviously didn't use identical resumes, or the HR person screening them would see that they had two applicants from the same school with the same major and the same jobs in their past.

I'd like to see these "equivalent resumes."

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

Scumbag recipe:

Take two job candidates with equivalent qualifications.
One's name should sound "white", the other "black".
Call 50% more candidates with "white" sounding names for an interview than the ones with "black" sounding names.
Bang your head against the wall, if you're black.

Imagine that.
Good reason to reconsider what you name your kids, don't you think? But for some reason the need or desire to name your newborn child an ethnic name which the average person cannot pronouce or spell.