What happens if you put a man's name on an application instead of a woman's?
The trial, which was an effort to push more women in senior position jobs, revealed that removing the gender from a candidate’s application does not help boost gender equality in hiring. The trial also revealed that adding a male name to a candidate’s application made them 3.2 percent less likely to get the job while adding a female name made it 2.9 percent more likely that the candidate would be hired....It's as if hiring boards were under intense pressure to find qualified female candidates, and really wanted to do so whenever possible.
“We anticipated this would have a positive impact on diversity — making it more likely that female candidates and those from ethnic minorities are selected for the shortlist,” said Professor Michael Hiscox, a Harvard academic. “We found the opposite, that de-identifying candidates reduced the likelihood of women being selected for the shortlist.”
7 comments:
What happens if you put an obviously African-American name like "Jamal" on an application instead of a white-sounding name?
I had a student named Jamal. Suffice it to say that his behavior would not have improved perception of the "Jamal" brand name. Not at all.
I don't think I've ever met anyone named "Jamal." I just used that because the particular study I linked to had it as an example.
It's kind of fun to read how disgusted the scientist who did that study was with the "slightly left of center" population that returned the racist results. He clearly expected better of good liberals. :)
A study of law-firm hiring in the US found that men who fit a profile identified by the researchers as “upper-class origins”…by listing hobbies like sailing and listening to classical music had a callback rate 12 times higher than those of men who signaled working-class origins, for example by mentioning country music and track and field sports.
For comparison, the callback ratio between those profiled as “upper class men” versus “upper class women” was 4X. Yet “lower class women” received callbacks at almost 5X the rate of “lower class men,” and at 1.6X the rate of “upper class women”!
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/55449.html
I like classical music as well as country music. I wonder what they'd make of that.
And I like classical, rag, swing, big band, dixieland, rock and roll, even some disco.
I'm probably too ill-disciplined to suit them, and I'd never get hired. 'Course another reason for my not getting hired might be that I'd not apply to such organizations in the first place.
On the other hand, this guy might be making heads explode.
Eric Hines
The giant flaw here is thinking that people make decisions like who to hire (especially at larger companies) by things like race or sex.
The truth here is that they don't hire blacks as readily because of the risk of lawsuit should they need to dismiss them (that's just the real world talking, not racism), and women over men must have to do with the perceived market/ corporate culture value of the perception of being pro-woman, and/or actual benefits in the applying for government contracts or the like, I suspect.
The bottom line is most business decisions are made based on bottom line, not ideology.
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