Unemployed Black Woman Pretends to be White, Job Offers Suddenly Skyrocket

Unemployed Black Woman Pretends to be White, Job Offers Suddenly Skyrocket(techyville.com)

57 points by sdqali 13 years ago | 20 comments

In economics, we call this signalling. Employers often have little information about the quality of the employee, so naturally they 'signals' that indicate the applicant is of high quality.

Things such as a college degree and experience are obvious signals, but they are not the only signals. Race and sex play a part as well, assuming that different races/sexes exhibit different behavior on average. This is statistical discrimination[1], not bigotry. In fact, this discrimination is efficient because it lessens the likelihood of choosing a bad employee. This is why men are given more job offers than women- a man is less likely to go on paternal leave or switch to part time because of 'stress'. If this discrimination did not occur, the employees would be of lower quality which hurts productivity.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_discrimination_(eco...

galvanist 13 years ago | |

You are operating on some very questionable assumptions which you've masked with jargon to lend credibility to your position. Kinda like phrenology. Where is your evidence that these race/gender "signals" correlate with applicant quality in any way?

But you are absolutely correct that employers do factor race into hiring and recruiting decisions. My evidence: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2018047

slg 13 years ago | |

You can call it whatever you want, but it is still illegal in the US if it has a bias against any protected class.

Although whether that is actually what is happening in this case is debatable.

unclebucknasty 13 years ago | |

Your (or anyone's) conclusions that men are "higher quality" employees simply because they are less likely to go on paternal leave or switch to part-time because of stress are spurious at best. There are many factors that go into determining the quality of an employee and these narrow observations are far from conclusive. For instance, who's to say that men don't simply become far-less productive in response to stress?

And, the link you provided does nothing to support your conclusions that such discrimination is "efficient". It draws no conclusions in either direction and, in fact, merely states that such discrimination exists. I think we know that.

Do you have any citations that show a positive correlation between discrimination and the quality of employees?

Because, otherwise--given the article to which you are responding--you seem to be propagating the idea that such discriminatory "signalling" is superior to credentials, experience, and other achievements when determining the quality of an employee. In fact, you seem to be endorsing what the author experienced as "efficient" and therefore beneficial from an economic perspective.

eterm 13 years ago |

Monster is weird, just uploading a CV again, even if nothing has changed from the previous version will result in a flood of recruiter contacts.

So that could be what happened here. (Or perhaps not, I'm open to the idea that there are a lot of racists out there sadly.)

Playing the Monster Game is all about updating ones CV every 2 weeks and filling out information, while not actually using the site to apply for a job ever (Instead look for the recruitment agencies posting the job listing and contact them directly).

If you just fire off "applications" via the main site you'll get nowhere.

ritchiea 13 years ago |

Definitely a misleading headline. I don't doubt she was discriminated against but it is pretty clear she was discriminated against because of her name, not her race because she was applying for jobs online. That could be discrimination based on assumed ethnicity but it could also be classism. Which is no better but worth clarifying.

Related story, in the early 2000's my grandparents lived in a not so nice part of the south side of Chicago, while I lived with my mother in the suburb Evanston. My grandparents bought their house before the neighborhood changed during white flight in the suburb boom and had no interest in moving as they aged. Eventually my mother moved back to the south side part time to help take care of them and while searching for a new job she found she got much better responses when she listed her Evanston address than when she listed my grandparents's address on the south side.

vishvananda 13 years ago |

I have to wonder how much of this is just because it was a new account. I assume some recruiters get notifications when new accounts are created that match certain criteria.

incision 13 years ago |

As I'm sure I've said before on HN I've worked for people who were quite open about discriminatory hiring and their underlying prejudices.

However, given the specifics of this story, my first thought is that the discrepancy here has more to do with the newness of the profile than the whiteness.

Also, I'd be surprised ethnicity information were provided directly to employers. In my experience with this kind of discrimination it's based on given names.

Come to think of it, I'd expect ethnicity to be used in order to filter in favor of minorities for the purpose of fulfilling DBE requirements and the like.

tokenadult 13 years ago |

This suggests an experiment that many people could attempt to replicate. I'm rather surprised that the user profile on the online job search service requires self-identifying (or specifically declining to self-identify) a "race" group, as there is no requirement in federal or state law that job-seekers must so self-identify, and the anecdote reported here suggests that self-identifying one way or another may have a non-trivial influence on the job search process. More investigation of this issue, specific to various kinds of jobs, would be well worth conducting.

phaus 13 years ago |

>In the end, a total of twenty-four employers looked at Bianca’s resume while only ten looked at mines.

"looked at mines."

I'm not sure what subterranean explosives have to do with racism.

She very well may have been discriminated against on monster.com, but she lost any sympathy that I had for her when I read that. If you want people to take you seriously, act like a professional.

This next part was even worse.

>middle aged White man complaining that he was making only $80,000 which was $30,000 less than what he was making before. I thought to myself that in this economy, many would feel they’d hit the jackpot if they made 80K a year.

Losing approximately a quarter of your income sucks, it doesn't matter who you are. Just because a pay reduction is better than unemployment doesn't mean a person doesn't have the right to feel cheated. The way the author worded this doesn't make her sound like a victim, instead it makes her sound as if she has a chip on her shoulder about white people in general.

If she wants her experiment to be taken seriously, she needs to stick to facts.

deckar01 13 years ago |

This is horrible. There needs to be a group doing this to keep these businesses accountable.

arjn 13 years ago |

Just to be clear here : is it that Monster was reporting race to the potential employers or is there something about her name (Yolanda Spivey) that is a give away ?

DanielBMarkham 13 years ago |

Why is this on HN? Are we supposed to debate racism in the insurance industry now?

I'm not going to comment and say I flagged this, because I want to stick with policy. But I have no idea how the community is supposed to participate in this story in a productive way. Looks like chat-bait.

It's a very interesting anecdote, from which nothing useful can be gained except a lot of excessive speculation and bickering.

EDIT: I apologize if I'm being old cranky guy again. Perhaps something positive will come of this. Perhaps the reason to post it here is for our productive analysis, and not just to rehash a tried-and-true method to steal thousands of productive man-hours from hackers across the globe having the same arguments about the same things they've always had -- the role of appearance or naming in sales, the bias of the culture, and so on.

ChrisNorstrom 13 years ago |

Sadly this isn't anything new. I knew as a kid that if your name "sounded black" you had a 70% chance of getting your resume tossed out.

This is everywhere. EVERYWHERE. All groups do this to some extent.

We've all heard of Italian neighborhoods that will only sell houses to other Italians, white neighborhoods that don't sell homes to blacks, asians, or latinos. Jewish apartment complexes & towns (especially in Bulgaria) that only allow other Jews in. Asian neighborhoods that rent out only to other asians. Some Christians, Muslims, & Jews can have similar policies for job openings and property sales.

Some racism is in response to previous racism which only furthers racism.

I know St. Louis' Mass Trasit Agency's Bus Garage Department is racist against whites and only hires blacks. A woman named Kim Kashone will throw out your resume and send you in circles if she finds out you aren't black. Employees who've worked there for over 10 years can tell you this. Despite whites applying, all the garage workers are black.

Whites even engage is discrimination against each other. If your last name is something very foreign sounding like Budrovich, Dimitrova, Biankanetzka people automatically discount you thinking, "when was the last time I heard of someone famous with a name like that? I'm not investing in this person because others didn't". Which is why most Americans have shortened and Americanized their last names so as to assimilate and be un-noticable. Which is sad in a Country like America which has immigrants from all over the world.

As awful as this is, this is a very normal and natural response for a group of people. A culture or race wants to see its own kind succeed and it's own culture flourish.

You can't take the human out of the human.