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A group of economists recently conducted an experiment at about 100 of the country’s largest companies, applying for jobs using made-up resumes with equivalent qualifications but different personal characteristics. They changed the applicants’ names to suggest they were black or white, and male or female: Latisha or Amy, Lamar or Adam.
On Monday, announced the names of the companies. They found that, on average, employers contacted white prospective applicants 9.5 percent more often than they contacted black prospective applicants.
However, this practice varied significantly by company and industry. One-fifth of companies (many of them retailers or auto dealers) were responsible for nearly half of the gap in callbacks to black and white applicants.
Two companies favored white applicants significantly more than black applicants. These were AutoNation, a used car retailer, which contacted prospective white applicants 43 percent more often, and Genuine Parts Company, which sells auto parts even under the NAPA brand, and called prospective white candidates 33 percent more often. hundred more frequently.
In a statement, Genuine Parts spokesperson Heather Ross said, “We are always evaluating our practices to ensure inclusivity and break down barriers, and we will continue to do so.” AutoNation did not respond to a request for comment.
Known as an audit studyThe experiment was the largest of its kind in the United States: Researchers sent 80,000 resumes to 10,000 jobs between 2019 and 2021. The results demonstrate how entrenched employment discrimination is in parts of the American labor market, and to what extent Black workers start out behind in certain industries.
“It doesn’t surprise me in the least,” said Daiquiri Steele, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama School of Law who previously worked for the Department of Labor on employment discrimination issues. “If you have trouble getting in, the biggest problem is the domino effect it has. It affects their wages and the economy of their community in the future.”
Some companies showed no difference in how they treated applications from people who were assumed to be white or black. Their human resources practices (and one policy in particular (more on this later)) offer guidance on how companies can avoid biased decisions in the hiring process.
Lack of racial bias was more common in certain industries: grocery stores, including Kroger; food products, including Mondelez; freight and transportation, including FedEx and Ryder; and wholesaler, including Sysco and McLane Company.
“We want to draw people’s attention not only to the fact that racism is real, sexism is real, that some discriminate, but also that it is possible to do better and that there is something to learn from those who have been doing a good job.” job. ”said Patrick Kline, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, who conducted the study with Evan K. Rose at the University of Chicago and Christopher R. Walters at Berkeley.
The researchers first published details of your experiment in 2021, but without naming the companies. The new paper, to be published in the American Economic Review, name the companies and explains the methodology developed to group them by their performance, taking into account statistical noise.
The study includes 97 companies. The jobs the researchers applied for were entry-level and did not require a college degree or substantial work experience. In addition to race and gender, the researchers tested other characteristics. protected by lawsuch as age and sexual orientation.
They sent up to 1,000 applications to each company, requesting up to 125 jobs per company in locations across the country, to try to uncover patterns in the companies’ operations in the face of isolated cases. They then tracked whether the employer contacted the applicant within 30 days.
A bias against black names
Companies that required a lot of customer interaction, such as sales and retail, particularly in the automotive sector, were more likely to show a preference for presumably white applicants. This was true even when applying for positions at those companies that did not involve customer interaction, suggesting that discriminatory practices were embedded in corporate culture or human resources practices, the researchers said.
Still, there were exceptions: Some of the companies that showed the least bias were retailers, such as Lowe’s and Target.
The study may underestimate the rate of discrimination against black applicants in the job market as a whole because it tested large companies, which tend to discriminate less, said Lincoln Quillian, a Northwestern sociologist who analyzes audit studies. He did not include names intended to represent Latino or Asian American applicants, but other research suggests that They are also they contact less than white applicants, although they face less discrimination than black applicants.
The experiment ended in 2021, and some of the companies involved may have changed their practices since then. Still a review of all available audit studies found that discrimination against black applicants had not changed in three decades. After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, such discrimination was found to be missing among certain employers, but the researchers behind that study said the effect was likely short-lived.
Gender and other characteristics
On average, companies did not treat male and female applicants differently. This aligns with other research showing that gender discrimination against women is rare in entry-level jobs and begins later in careers.
However, when companies favored men (especially in manufacturing) or women (mainly in clothing stores), the biases were much greater than those for race. Builders FirstSource contacted male prospective applicants more than twice as often as female applicants. Ascena, owner of brands such as Ann Taylor, contacted women 66 percent more than men.
Neither company responded to requests for comment.
The consequences of being a woman differed by race. The differences were small, but being female provided a slight benefit for white applicants and a slight penalty for black applicants.
The researchers also tested several other characteristics protected by law, with a smaller number of resumes. They discovered that there was a small penalty for being over 40 years old.
Overall, they found no penalties for using non-binary pronouns. Being gay, as indicated by listing membership in an LGBTQ club on the resume, resulted in a slight penalty for white applicants, but benefited black applicants; Although the effect was small, when this was on their resumes, the racial penalty disappeared.
Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination is illegal even if it’s unintentional. However, in the real world, it’s difficult for job seekers to know why they haven’t heard back from a company.
“These practices are particularly difficult to address because applicants often do not know if they are being discriminated against in the hiring process,” Brandalyn Bickner, spokesperson for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said in a statement. (She has seen the data and spoken to researchers, although she could not use an academic study as a basis for research, she said.)
What companies can do to reduce discrimination
The researchers found that several common measures, such as employing a chief diversity officer, offering diversity training or having a diverse board of directors, were not correlated with less discrimination in initial hiring.
But one thing strongly predicted less discrimination: a centralized HR Operation.
Investigators recorded the voicemail messages the fake applicants received. When a company’s calls came from fewer individual phone numbers, suggesting that they came from a central office, there tended to be less bias. When they came from individual hiring managers at local stores or warehouses, there were more. These messages often sounded frantic and informal, asking if an applicant could start the next day, for example.
“That’s where implicit biases come into play,” Professor Kline said. A more formalized hiring process helps overcome this, he said: “Just thinking about things, what steps to take, having to ask someone for something for approval, can be very important in mitigating bias.”
At Sysco, a wholesale restaurant food distributor, which showed no racial bias in the study, a centralized recruiting team reviews resumes and decides who to call. “Consistency in how we review candidates, focusing on the requirements of the position, is key,” said Ron Phillips, chief human resources officer at Sysco. “It reduces the opportunity for personal views to arise in the process.”
Another important factor is diversity among the people they hire, said Paula Hubbard, chief human resources officer at McLane Company. It procures, stores and delivers products for large chains like Walmart, and showed no racial bias in the study. About 40 percent of the company’s recruiters are people of color and 60 percent are women.
Diversifying the pool of people who apply also helps, human resources officials said. McLane attends events for women in trucking and puts up billboards in Spanish.
So does contracting based on Skills versus degrees.. While McLane used to require a college degree for many positions, he changed that practice after determining which specific skills were most important for warehouse or driving jobs. “Now we do that for all our jobs: Is a degree really required?” Ms. Hubbard said. “Why? Does it make sense? Is experience enough?”
Hilton, another company that showed no racial bias in the study, also stopped requiring degrees for many jobs in 2018.
Another factor associated with less hiring bias, according to the new study, was greater regulatory scrutiny, such as at federal contractors or at companies with more Department of Labor citations.
Finally, the most profitable companies were less biased, in line with a long duration economic theory Nobel Laureate Gary Becker that discrimination is bad for business. Economists said that could be because more profitable companies benefit from a more diverse set of employees. Or it could be an indication that they had more efficient business processes, in HR and elsewhere.
