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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