people with chinese, indian or pakistani-sounding names are ___ % less likely to get invited to an interview than the candidates with english-sounding names, even when their qualifications were the same.

get people with chinese, indian or pakistani-sounding names are ___ % less likely to get invited to an interview than the candidates with english-sounding names, even when their qualifications were the same. from screen.

What’s in a Name? Name Discrimination and Hiring in the UK

Name discrimination is one of the most common forms of bias in the UK, especially in hiring. Hard to recognise and often unconscious, how do we tackle it?

What’s in a Name? Name Discrimination and Hiring in the UK

Published by:

Demetre Constantopoulos

July 23, 2019 4 min read

What is Applied? Why Applied? Book a Demo

Debiased Hiring Bundle

Get FREE Bundle

Unless you’re The Artist Formerly Known as Prince or Arya Stark around season six of Game of Thrones, you’ll have a name. Half parental choice and half accident of history, the chances are you will be tied to your name for the rest of your life.

While there are many people who choose to change their name out of personal preference, others feel compelled to change theirs for more sinister reasons. In this article, we’ll explore the nature of name discrimination, how it manifests in society and the ways in which it can be tackled, especially when it comes to hiring in the UK.

‍

What is name discrimination?

Name discrimination refers to a form of prejudice where an individual is negatively discriminated against on accounts of their name. This type of prejudice is often predicated on cultural stereotypes that can influence a person’s decision making, either consciously or – as we covered in another post and is generally more prevalent – unconsciously.

Our names are typically loaded with a significant amount of information about ourselves. From our gender to our ethnicity to our age, other people can infer (either rightly or wrongly) details about our lives just from looking at our names.

‍

Types of bias that can result in name discrimination:

Racial bias Gender bias Cultural Bias Religious Bias Class bias Age bias ‍

Name discrimination in hiring

While name discrimination can occur in all aspects of society, it is in hiring that it most noticeably raises its ugly head. The detrimental effects of biases such as name discrimination penetrate deeper than just the world of work; they bleed into the economy, politics and the wider society we live in.

As name discrimination is more often than not influenced by unconscious bias, it is particularly hard to recognise, especially when applying for jobs. Most people will write off a lack of responses from potential employers as bad luck or an error with their CV or application. Few would be so bold as to blame the unconscious bias of recruiters or curse the inherent prejudicial tendencies of human nature but, as the following studies will show, there are figures to support the suspicions.

‍

The studies behind name discrimination

·     University of Toronto, 2017 – researches used data from an earlier study in 2011 where 13,000 fake résumés were sent to 3,000 job vacancies. Their study showed that people with Chinese, Indian or Pakistani-sounding names were 28% less likely to make the interview stage than other fictitious candidates with English-sounding names. This was despite the qualifications and experience level being the same for all candidates.

·     French government, 2016 – a consulting firm commissioned by the labour ministry sent out 3,000 applications for 1,500 jobs advertised by 40 companies in six French cities. The study found that employers were less likely to interview candidates with North African-sounding names.

·     UK government, 2012 – an all parliamentary group study found that women from ethnic minorities who “whitened” their names or changed them to sound more Anglo-Saxon had to apply for half as many jobs to receive an interview invitation as those whose names sounded more foreign.

·     BBC’s Inside Out London, 2017 – even with a small sample size of two candidates and 100 job opportunities, this study reflected the same pattern of discrimination. While both candidates were equally qualified, “Adam” received 12 interview offers while “Mohamed” was only offered four.

‍

Tackling name discrimination in UK hiring

It’s clear to see that name discrimination is a prevalent and persistent problem in society. So how do we go about reducing it? While there is no silver bullet that can completely eradicate this indirect form of discrimination, there are ways to prevent it.

In 2017, David Cameron announced that UCAS (the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service) would be adopting a “name-blind” applications process for all future admissions. Other organisations followed suit, including the Civil Service, BBC, NHS, KPMG, HSBC and Virgin Money.

While this is definitely a step in the right direction, it still leaves the door open for bias to creep in at later stages of the recruiting process. As Azmat Mohammed from the Institute of Recruiters explains:

“But the reality is that people carrying out interviews, at the next stage on from applications, are humans. The thing is for them to be able to analyse their own biases. Everybody has them and businesses are working to address this issues.”

Discrimination training may be able to address more overt forms of discrimination in the workplace but they will not be effective in tackling unconscious biases such as name discrimination, especially as it predominantly takes place during the hiring process.

Why stop at name-blind recruiting when you could go the whole hog and remove all irrelevant information from the process?

स्रोत : www.beapplied.com

Job applicants with foreign names have lesser chance for interviews: UBC study

Job applicants with English-sounding names have a greater chance of getting interviews than those with Chinese, Pakistani or Indian names, a new study by University of British Columbia researchers suggests.

British Columbia

Job applicants with foreign names have lesser chance for interviews: UBC study

Job applicants with English-sounding names have a greater chance of getting interviews than those with Chinese, Pakistani or Indian names, a new study by University of British Columbia researchers suggests.

Social Sharing

Facebook Twitter Email Reddit LinkedIn

CBC News · Posted: May 20, 2009 9:04 PM EDT | Last Updated: May 21, 2009

Philip Oreopoulos, an economics professor at UBC, says more research is needed to determine whether employers deliberately withheld interviews from candidates with non-English-sounding names. ((CBC))

Job applicants with English-sounding names have a greater chance of getting interviews than those with Chinese, Pakistani or Indian names, a new study by University of British Columbia researchers suggests.

The study found Canadians and landed immigrants with names such as "Jill Wilson" or "John Martin" are 40 per cent more likely to be offered an interview than someone with a name like "Sana Khan" or "Lei Li," given an identical resumé.

Applicants with mixed names like "Vivian Zhang" had a 20 per cent better chance to land an interview than job-seekers with non-English names, but still less than the English-only names.

"The findings suggest that a distinct foreign-sounding name may be a significant disadvantage on the job market even if you are a second- or third-generation citizen," said Philip Oreopoulos, a professor of economics at UBC who led the research.

'There's certainly an element of unfairness going on that an individual with a distinct foreign name is not being given the chance to go to the next round.'— Philip Oreopoulos, University of British Columbia

Oreopoulos's working paper was released Wednesday by Metropolis British Columbia, part of an international immigration and diversity research network.

The researchers tailored 6,000 mock resumés to meet specific job requirements in 20 occupational categories and sent them last fall to 2,000 online job postings from potential employers in the Greater Toronto Area.

Each resumé listed a bachelor's degree and four to six years of experience, with name and domestic or foreign education and work experience randomly assigned.

"I was surprised to see almost as much name discrimination going on here as there was in the United States between distinct black- and white-sounding names," Oreopoulos said.

Might break laws

Name-based discrimination may contravene human rights laws, he said, although more research is needed to determine whether the employers' behaviour was intentional.

"There's certainly an element of unfairness going on that an individual with a distinct foreign name is not being given the chance to go to the next round and prove to the employer that they could be a better candidate," Oreopoulos said.

Michael Lam of SUCCESS, an immigrant advocacy group based in Vancouver, said the findings present a "strong impression that the business community is still not fully aware or understand the immigrant community."

The group's chief executive officer, Tung Chan, added that the phenomenon is nothing new.

"It's something that we hear all the time, that we see all the time," Chan said.

"Many of them feel that there is a glass ceiling that they are hitting, and it comes back to the same thing — the feeling that they belong to a different cultural group."

The study also found employers preferred Canadian work experience over Canadian education.

For resumés with foreign names and education, call backs nearly doubled when the applicant had held one previous job in Canada.

"This suggests policies that prioritize Canadian experience or help new immigrants find initial domestic work experience might significantly increase their employment chances," Oreopoulos said.

CBC's Journalistic Standards and Practices|About CBC News

Corrections and clarifications|Submit a news tip|

RELATED STORIES

VIDEO: Professor Philip Oreopoulos talks about name discrimination research (Runs 13:32)

DOCUMENT: Why do skilled immigrants struggle in the labour market? (PDF)

YOUR VIEW: Have you been discriminated against because of your name?

EXTERNAL LINKS

Metropolis British Columbia

स्रोत : www.cbc.ca

Asian Last Names Lead To Fewer Job Interviews, Still : Code Switch : NPR

For many Asian-Americans, this kind of discrimination means that the pressure to change their names and shed the perpetual foreigner stereotype is strong.

CODE SWITCH

Asian Last Names Lead To Fewer Job Interviews, Still

February 23, 201710:18 AM ET

By Jenny J. Chen

When it comes to job applications, not all names are treated equally.

Terry Vine/Getty Images

What's in a name? A lot, according to a new study from researchers at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto, both in Canada.

The study found that job applicants in Canada with Asian names — names of Indian, Pakistani or Chinese origin — were 28 percent less likely to get called for an interview compared to applicants with Anglo names, even when all the qualifications were the same. Researchers used data from a previous study conducted in 2011 where they sent out 12,910 fictitious resumes in response to 3,225 job postings. The previous study, also in Canada, similarly found that applicants with Anglo first names and Asian last names didn't fare much better than applicants with Asian first and last names.

"Some people still believe that minorities have an advantage," said one of the study authors, Jeffrey Reitz, a sociologist at the University of Toronto. "These studies are important to challenge that and show that not only is this kind of discrimination happening, but it's quite systemic."

Reitz, who completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United States and has conducted numerous studies comparing race relations in the two North American countries, says this kind of discrimination is prevalent in the U.S. as well. "It's a very intense belief that we're a multicultural country in the way that the U.S. is not. But it's not terribly different in the two countries," said Reitz.

Sponsor Message

A two-year study published in the Administrative Science Quarterly Journal found that Asian job candidates in the U.S. were almost twice as likely to receive a call back if they whitened their resumes by changing their names and excluding race-based honors and organizations. (The same was true for African-American candidates).

Last year, a young Asian-American named Tiffany Trieu who applied for a graphic design position received a letter from the president of the studio denying her the job because "we've hired so many foreign nationals that it seems time for us to hire an American, or be unfair." Trieu was born in the United States.

In the same year, the U.S. Department of Labor filed an administrative lawsuit against Palantir Technologies alleging that the data mining startup systematically discriminated against Asian job applicants. The case claimed that while 77 percent of applicants for several engineering positions were Asian, less than 15 percent of the people hired were Asian. Palantir has denied these allegations of discrimination and the case is still pending.

The kind of discrimination described in the study often goes unnoticed because statistics often portray Asian-Americans as doing quite well — one of the best educated, highest income racial groups in the United States. But such statistics belie the fact that they're still not treated equally in comparison to their white counterparts. What's more, data on Asian-Americans is rarely broken up sufficiently so that it differentiates between Cambodian-Americans and Korean-Americans. That level of generalization can skew perceptions of how parts of the population are doing in certain regards.

Sponsor Message

Reitz said that when researchers of the studies cited above asked employers to explain why they called fewer Asian applicants, they usually received a response along the lines of, "Well, you see an Asian name and you know that language problems are going to be there."

For many Asian-Americans, this kind of discrimination means that the pressure to change their names and shed the perpetual foreigner stereotype is strong. In 2009, Texas state representative Betty Brown suggested during House testimony that all Chinese-Americans change their names to ones "we could deal with more readily here." But for many, those Asian names given at birth hold a lot of meaning. As Quartz writer Zheping Huang wrote, "This is the only name that I feel I belong to."

Jenny J. Chen is an award-winning science journalist and multimedia producer. Follow her @americanhaiku.

studies discrimination names asian asian americans united states

More Stories From NPR

RACE

Whose Nightmares Are We Telling? How Horror Has Evolved for People of Color

RACE

We owe women of color for the foods we love to eat

स्रोत : www.npr.org