Everyone once in a while this question comes up, and there’s someone who just refuses to see it.
Many years ago, what made it clear to me were the resume studies. They all run as follows: identical resumes are sent out, with the only difference being names. Perhaps the names are male or female; perhaps they are studying racial bias and they obviously ethnic or white, “John Smith.”
Every time some variation of this study is run the results come back that women or minorities get less interviews.
On two different occasions, Speak With a Geek presented the same 5,000 candidates to the same group of employers. The first time around, details like names, experience and background were provided. Five percent selected for interviews were women.
You can guess what happened next, right? When identifying details were suppressed, that figure jumped to 54 percent. (See the update at the bottom please, this may not be accurate.)
As part of a different study from 2011, researchers sent out almost 13,000 fake résumés to over 3,000 job postings. The academics went back to this data at the start of 2017 and found that people with Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani-sounding names were 28 percent less likely to get invited to an interview than the fictitious candidates with English-sounding names, even when their qualifications were the same.
Perhaps the best, and one of the oldest, is about auditions:
In the ’70s, The New York Times notes, symphonies started having musicians audition behind partitions, and researchers at Harvard and Princeton found (PDF) that when blind auditions were used, the odds of a woman being hired by an orchestra jumped from 25 percent to 46 percent.
There are plenty more where these came from.
Prejudice exists. It is important. It is unfair. I am a strong believer in blind resumes, auditions, and tests. The old fashioned civil service exams cut out a lot of bullshit. Not all of it, of course, tests still have biases, but they reduce bias a lot.
It’s a simple position to hold that everyone should be treated fairly, and that if something is extraneous to ability to do a job, as gender almost always is, and ethnicity virtually always is, it shouldn’t be a factor. This is especially true because, as a society, we insist on distributing goods and services through money, and money, for almost everyone, through jobs. Prejudice, thus, matters a lot.
I’m not a big fan of identity politics, for a variety of reasons. But it is insane to pretend that forced identities and prejudice don’t exist and don’t matter and that it isn’t important to deal with them. I’d prefer to deal with them in large part (but not entirely) by changing how we distribute goods and services, because making it a game of musical chairs with only a few good chairs and not enough chairs for everyone means that someone will always lose, and lose badly.
When there are losers whose fate is shitty lives, a good chance of homelessness, illness and death, the game gets nasty. Less nasty games, with less nasty consequences, lead to less nasty playing. Maybe half of the jobs we do either outright make the world worse off or a net washes which we could do without in a better-designed society. But to live in that society, we’d have to stop distributing the majority of resources through jobs.
Still, again, to pretend that prejudice doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter is jejeune. It exists and it matters a lot and those on the sticky end of the wicket know it and are mad, as they should be.
Update: The curse of shoddy research strikes. It appears the resume study for men and women in STEM may not be a good one. Read here for more.
I’ll talk about this more in the future.
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NR
Good post. While it’s frustrating that some politicians today want to pretend that class doesn’t matter at all, it’s important to remember that there is such a thing as class reductionism. Racial and sexual discrimination are still out there and I have no patience for anyone who tries to deny that.
Eric Anderson
“Less nasty games, with less nasty consequences, lead to less nasty playing.”
““I’d rather be a black middle-class person than a white poor person.”
–Bhaskar Sunkara
Is this not the class solution to identity issues in a nutshell? Increased economic power = increased identity power.
NR
@Eric Anderson:
Increased economic power is not always sufficient to stop the effects of identity-based prejudice. See, for example, the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Oklahoma in 1921, where increased economic power in the black community may have actually inflamed racial resentment toward them.
Joan
I have experienced this personally. Despite my alias here, I am a woman with a man’s name. Twice I’ve had employers tell me they didn’t realize I was a woman until I showed up for the interview. I wonder if I’ve had male privilege on other occasions too and no one informed me of it.
Tom
Well one way to get around this is not to let companies do hiring themselves, but have all eligible working age people register through a Works Progress Administration which then looks at all their skills and finds them jobs. If necessary they will pay to move them to where the job is and provide housing for them.
In return, companies can not turn away people sent to them by the WPA, and can’t fire them without good cause proven.
Combined with other reforms to improve peoples’ economic well being, it can work.
Ché Pasa
Ian: yes, yes, and yes.
Some aspects of racial/ethnic/status/gender prejudice can be controlled. You can have a society in which everyone has a decent life from birth and systemic support toward success in life without interference by prejudices. We saw this happen or try to in many socialist and communist countries throughout most of the 20th century. Superficially it worked spectacularly.
Prejudices weren’t completely eliminated but they were largely suppressed, and opportunities for many previously excluded or discounted categories of people were greatly expanded. Their efforts and loyalty, after all, were needed. The idea of inclusion rather than exclusion was inculcated while provision was made to ensure a decent — if sometimes minimal — life for everyone.
The collapse of the Soviet Union undid much of that effort. Some of the most horrible results of that dissolution took place in the Balkans where ethnic rivalries and prejudices surged to the forefront leading to long and very bloody civil wars and ethnic separations that were something of the type-model for what’s been happening in the Middle East and is serving as an inspiration for similar efforts beyond the Middle East.
The former Soviet Union itself has largely broken apart into ethnic enclaves, and Mother Russia has very much become a center of white/right nationalism. That’s one reason why the Trump regime has sought to ally with it, but Russia is not the only white/rightist society, and Trump himself cannot imagine an alliance he cannot dominate. So there is as yet no real alliance with Russia though common interest alliances between white/rightists flourish globally.
Part of the reason why we’re facing an odd and cruel restoration of prejudicial societies pretty much everywhere, even where overt prejudice was largely suppressed, is that in the view of many national leaders, everyone isn’t needed. In this view, there are simply too many people, consuming too many resources that rightly belong to preferred individuals and groups and getting rid of the excess one way or another is necessary for the survival of the chosen. Similar sorting must take place within and among the chosen until a new balance between included and excluded is achieved.
This way of thinking is not limited to the white/right. It’s becoming standard all over the globe, no matter the ethnicity or racial make up of the society. It is a way of thinking dominated by alpha-or would be alpha — males.
Inclusion seems to require something we don’t see much anymore: common effort toward an expansive goal. That’s the foundation, for example, of the Green New Deal. The thinking is there’s a huge challenge to be met and it can only be met through the common efforts of everyone, on behalf of everyone. And that’s one reason the very idea of it is being resisted so strenuously across the board. It shatters the enclave/identity paradigm that has been so successfully used by the current power structure to keep people divided and competing with one another for diminishing “good.”
ponderer
So Ian thinks life is unfair. I agree, there is little or nothing fair in this world and the goal of being unbiased in our treatment of other people may be unobtainable. Then the question becomes should we as individuals be biased in order to “correct” the world biases more to neutrality. That’s not a position I can support. One can support equality for all, or one cannot. There is no middle ground, no equality through prejudice.
Still, again, to pretend that prejudice doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter is jejeune. It exists and it matters a lot and those on the sticky end of the wicket know it and are mad, as they should be.
Who pretends that prejudice doesn’t exist? Who among us hasn’t been affected by it? We are all treated unfairly to different degree’s but still unfairly. The article is founded off of resume’s for Christ sakes, the only people that think that job hiring practices are fair haven’t been through the process more than once. Most of the time the candidate has already been picked but HR makes the managers interview a representative pool. It doesn’t matter who gets interviewed, unless you care about wasting peoples time equally. Having worked at a fortune 500 company where a quarter of the people in the building are related, I can’t see any particular insight or merit in this article. Why, because it’s focusing on a subset of biases, gender and ethnicity, in a grossly more biased system. Because it’s tailored for identity politics, which only serves to divide and marginalize. Because it’s being given to the wrong audience, the few hiring managers here are already left leaning and not tossing out resumes because James is better than Jamal. What are we supposed to do with this information, those of us with no stake or responsibility for perpetuating it? We’d have to be fools to accept proposals to suffer for the bad treatment of someone else. Are we to tell our children to forget about college because there is a chance that a someone who is more of a minority might want that supervisor position? How far have you thought this through, who have you decided should suffer?
I don’t understand why otherwise intelligent people can’t see identity politics for the trap it is. It is designed to divide the D party, not encourage debate or fairness. There is no reason 99% of the populace shouldn’t be Democrats, *EXCEPT*, for identity politics. If we are making the broad assumption that Democrats support working people and Republicans the trickle down rich, that’s not much of a divide. The reason that congress changes hands so seldom for 60 years, without identity politics, but then picks back up again in the 90’s seems to be lost to those D who enjoy losing.
someofparts
Identity politics has the same problem we can see in economics, which is being divorced from considerations of economic class. Economics will become much more useful if it ever reverts to political economy. Check out the work of Mark Blyth to see how that would look. As to identity politics, that would move back toward something more useful the day that the ladies of MeToo universally adopt the message that protections against sexist harassment are a useless joke to women who do not have economic security.
Herman
I generally agree with this but I have a few quibbles. One is that meritocratic ideas like blind resumes, auditions and exams will probably make things worse for most poor and working-class people because they would limit their freedom and wiggle room within the economic system.
First, a true meritocracy is probably not possible without implementing a totalitarian system. You would have to somehow equalize childhood education which means no more private schools and tutors, all funding to public schools must be equalized and small children would have to be taken from their mothers and placed in state-run nurseries because early childhood enrichment is crucial to future academic success. This doesn’t even get into the controversial and sticky issue of genetic endowment.
Then you would have to abolish family-owned companies and even make it illegal for friends and family to help each other get jobs which, in addition to being a huge restriction on liberty, would probably hurt people at the bottom of the job market who might have to rely on favors because their poor resumes cannot get through automated human resources programs. A person with a criminal record or gaps in their resume due to bouts of unemployment would probably have no chance of ever working again or they would be permanently relegated to the worst jobs available with little hope of advancement.
Second, even if we could institute a true meritocracy it would likely make inequality worse. A meritocratic system would likely produce an even more arrogant elite than the one we have now because they would be sure that their positions were due to their inherent superiority and that the poor truly deserve their fate. When Michael Young popularized the term “meritocracy” in his 1958 book “The Rise of the Meritocracy” it was meant to describe a dystopia not a utopia but a lot of people failed to see that. There is also evidence that merely believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and less generous.
https://aeon.co/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you
Third, the way the Left discusses privilege, prejudice and discrimination is not helpful and is even pernicious. Even if there is some validity to the idea of white privilege, as a political term it produces nothing but division and pushes more whites to the Right. How should a poor or working-class white person respond to the claim that they are privileged? They will mostly likely tell you to take a hike, to put it nicely.
Privilege discourse also tends to obscure class differences and you end up with stuff like Hillary Clinton-style feminism where more female CEOs is somehow a victory for all women (including poor women) and Obama’s daughters are among the oppressed while the son of an unemployed West Virginia coal miner is put in the privileged category.
That being said, I agree that making things better for everyone is the way forward. The reason we are seeing more emphasis around identity is because there are fewer and fewer good jobs available and people will inevitably start to get tribal when things go badly.
Decline helps to explain not only left-wing identity politics but also the kind of right-wing identity politics that we are seeing among whites. It also helps to explain helicopter parenting and cheating on things like college admissions. People are getting desperate and without a move toward a more egalitarian and sustainable society, the dog-eat-dog competition will only get worse.
Tal Hartsfeld
When Chet Atkins introduced Charlie Pride to RCA’s Nashville Division he did so by playing a demo copy for the agent in charge of that division, being coy in not introducing Pride in person.
Upon hearing the demo tape the agent was impressed enough with this “new talent” to take a chance on him, and Pride got signed on
…and the rest is history.
Will
Herman it is nice to see someone actually see the frivolous results of blindly accepting this hierarchy of privilege. It does indeed become tiresome being lectured on such things by 4th generation “victims” and Ivy League bluebloods….
Their entirely appropriate response: Tell it to the chaplain, he gets paid to listen to that kind of shit.
I concur.
Will
Will
4th generation college educated “victims” I meant to type. Begging pardon…
nihil obstet
The People’s Policy Project had a couple of good posts on the effect of race. One examined the role of race and class on likelihood of being incarcerated. It concludes
The other addresses <a href=https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/03/05/wealth-inequality-across-class-and-race-in-5-graphs/wealth inequality across class and race. It analyzes data from the survey of consumer finance. Within race inequality is similar for all races — that is, the inequality between the richest members of each race and the poorest members of the same race is the same for all races. However, whites disproportionately constitute the wealthier classes. The study concludes,
Eric Anderson
Damn, nihil. That’s good info.
Thank you.
Hugh
Equal pay for equal work, equal access to things like housing, jobs, credit, education, healthcare, etc., similar results for similar inputs are not meritocratic. They are about fairness and justice. They are about the kind of society we want to live in.
Plenue
@NR
‘Ecomonic reductionism’ may at worst be incomplete, but it will get you a large part of the way to a better and more equal world. Whereas identity politics stripped of optical economy will get you absolutely nowhere, other than perhaps to voting for some pandering politician or other. That’s why it’s such a valuable tool; because it doesn’t actually change anything and thus isn’t a threat to the status quo.