Rex Kerr
2 min readJan 14, 2022

--

The literature is larger than you present here, though.

Resume whitening appears to work (as of 5 years ago): http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%20R2%20Accepted.pdf

It has about a 10-15% effect size (tables 4 and 5), and the name alone seems likely to be significant (~5% maybe). The two key findings are (1) whitening helps both Asians and blacks, and (2) pro-diversity efforts don't do anything: bias is still there, to roughly the same degree.

This suggests that the effect is implicit bias, not explicit prejudice: implicit bias is not affected by desire for diversity because it's operates instinctively (pre-rationally); while explicit prejudice can be moderated by explicit goals (since both are evaluated as part of the rational process).

Another large current study is https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/randres.pdf.

This one shows that (1) there's a ~9% detriment to having a characteristically black name, and (2) that it's company specific, indicating that some companies have procedures or people that do not display implicit bias (maybe in response to things like the previous paper), while others have substantial bias.

Anyway, these things indicate that the phenomenon is still real, though apparently it's greatly improved since the 2003 study. (Or maybe not--there are other more recent studies that still find large (~50%) effects...but the one I cited above is more comprehensive.)

The remaining question is whether it's (1) racism, (2) culturism, (3) classism, or (4) some other sort of othering (e.g. just unfamiliarity).

This hasn't been carefully measured, but that it is at least in part culturism and probably isn't unfamiliarity is suggested by https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31675282/: when you do the same kind of studies with characteristically black African names, those names do better than the black American names.

Anyway, the effect seems real, isn't particularly fair, seems to be getting better, is company-specific at this point, and seems to be at least in part a cultural or class bias with perceived race used as a cue to trigger it.

And how big the effect is is always really important to know: these days it seems on the order of 10%.

--

--

Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

No responses yet