“Sometimes I don’t even think people know or are conscious or aware that they’re judging – even if it’s by name – but I think we all do it all the time.” These are the words of Jose Zemora, taken from this article from inquisitor.com. Zemora, who was on the job hunt for nearly 3 months, would fill out 40-100 applications a day. After a few months, he had not received a single call back. He then came to the realization that it was possibly because of his Latino sounding name, so he opted to drop the ‘s’ making his name just ‘Joe’ in his applications. And so he did. Sending the same information and resume, he simply changed his name to Joe, and within a week, received a flood of call backs and follow ups from the same exact companies he applied to as Jose, showing a clear difference in companies decision to employ based on assumed race. Jose further explains his story in this video.

Although Jose’s experience is only of one individual, there have been several other studies revealing similar effects of a name on an application. In the article “Who is More Likely to Get Called for a Job Interview – Lakisha or Emily?” a study, which was published in the American Economic Review in 2004, the difference in a companies decision to give a call back based on a name is explored. The study sent out nearly identical surveys to about 5,000 companies. In half of the resumes, there were white sounding names like “Emily” and “Eric” and in the other half, black sounding names such as “Lakisha” and “Jamal.” Again, these resumes were identical in every other way. 

            What the results yielded was that there was a significant difference in call backs. 

Reviewing the chart above, which measures the call back percentage if white, its shown that white sounding names had a 9.65% call back, with a confidence interval of 0 to 67.52% (confidence interval not shown in chart.)

 

On the other hand, the above graph shows the likelihood of a call black with an application with a more diverse sounding name. the average number of call blacks plummets to 6.45%, while the confidence interval (again not shown) falls between 0 and 54.57%

            What this shows is that those with white sounding names on their applications are nearly 50% more likely to receive a call back than their black counterparts. This reveals an obvious discrimination in the hiring process. Though it is illegal to discriminate based on race in the workplace, companies are able to do so because of the difficulty of revealing a company’s indecision of hire on the grounds of race.