Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers [pdf]

Abstract:

"We study the results of a massive nationwide correspondence experiment sending more than 83,000 fictitious applications with randomized characteristics to geographically dispersed jobs posted by 108 of the largest U.S. employers.

Distinctively Black names reduce the probability of employer contact by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively white names. The magnitude of this racial gap in contact rates differs substantially across firms, exhibiting a between-company standard deviation of 1.9 percentage points.

Despite an insignificant average gap in contact rates between male and female applicants, we find a between-company standard deviation in gender contact gaps of 2.7 percentage points, revealing that some firms favor male applicants while others favor women.

Company-specific racial contact gaps are temporally and spatially persistent, and negatively correlated with firm profitability, federal contractor status, and a measure of recruiting centralization. Discrimination exhibits little geographical dispersion, but two digit industry explains roughly half of the cross-firm variation in both racial and gender contact gaps. Contact gaps are highly concentrated in particular companies, with firms in the top quintile of racial discrimination responsible for nearly half of lost contacts to Black applicants in the experiment.

Controlling false discovery rates to the 5% level, 23 individual companies are found to discriminate against Black applicants. [See Appendix] Our findings establish that systemic illegal discrimination is concentrated among a select set of large employers, many of which can be identified with high confidence using large scale inference methods."

This isn't really surprising - this sort of thing has been shown for quite a while as the citations showed. I had a friend who happened to be Black and have a very "Black" sounding name tell me that he actually took away his photo on LinkedIn and changed his name and got way more recruiters contacting him (though I've also had similar things said by non-Blacks, so IDK).

I actually did not believe him since he's also in the tech industry and didn't think such things would happen for Software Engineers alas the table at the end (Figure 9) shows a small difference.

I wonder why the food product industry has such a huge difference.

Is 2.1 percent large or small? For example, is it 50.0 vs 52.1 percent (and thus marginal), or 1.0 vs 3.1 percent (and thus massive)?

For college admissions it is different: it is Asians that are discriminated against, not African Americans https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-rac...

And the way it is done is through "holistic review" process, see: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...

Excerpt: From colleges’ perspective, “holistic” is just shorthand for, we make the decisions we make, and would rather not be asked to spell out each one. It’s a way for schools to discreetly take various sensitive factors—“overrepresented” minorities, or students whose families might donate a gym—into account.