On page 105, Sugrue references a study about job discrimination (actually it’s about ten studies if you look at the notes pages.) This one in particular was by Marianne Bertrand found that after sending out comparable applications to over 1300 job postings, people with white sounding names were 50% more likely to receive a callback from a job than people with black sounding names.
I think studies like this are incredibly interesting because like Bertrand states, I do not think that the majority of employers are aware of their bias. I think this is just another example of an unconscious bias that a lot of people have because of our misconceptions of race. It also contributes to lower employment rates of African Americans, as this summary mentions, because African Americans have to send out 15 applications on average to expect one call back, whereas white people have to send out 10 to expect 1 callback. This study, and others like it, is just further evidence that we are not a colorblind society at all. The fact that people seem to still have racist ideas/stereotypes without realizing it sort of terrifies me. It really makes me wonder if we will ever be able to see true racially equality when racism is so deeply bedded in our minds.
Summary of study: http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.html
I feel though she put a lot of effort into the study she failed to make it actually scientific. As she stated each resume was similar but still had defining factors that differed between each other. It would have been different if they used one resume and just changed the name. Also you do not know these employers out of all honesty some employer may have had an affiliation to a specific school or thing that was on one of the applicants resume. It is a very bold statement to say it comes down to race when she doesn’t actually state what could have affected the study.
ReplyDeleteFor instance if I was a job employer and I had four applications two of them being African Americans and two being white. It so happens that one of the white applicants went to Rhodes College I would pick him because of his affiliation. Now if it was the other way around and the African American applicant went to Rhodes I would have picked him over the white guys. Now is that preference or racism? There are much more factors that go into the job hiring process such as location, background, school, your credit, skill set, needs of the department, and how people already working there will perceive the new employee.