WHAT A DIFFERENCE A NAME MAKES....

WHAT'S in a name? Evidently plenty if you are looking for a job. To test whether employers discriminate against black job applicants, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan of M.I.T. conducted an unusual experiment. They selected 1,300 help-wanted ads from newspapers in Boston and Chicago and submitted multiple résumés from phantom job seekers.

Kristen and Tamika, and Brad and Tyrone, applied for jobs from the same pool of want ads and had equivalent résumés. Nine names were selected to represent each category: black women, white women, black men and white men. Last names common to the racial group were also assigned. Four résumés were typically submitted for each job opening, drawn from a reservoir of 160. Nearly 5,000 applications were submitted from mid-2001 to mid-2002. Professors Bertrand and Mullainathan kept track of which candidates were invited for job interviews.

The results are disturbing. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called for interviews than were those with black-sounding names. Interviews were requested for 10.1 percent of applicants with white-sounding names and only 6.7 percent of those with black-sounding names. IN LIGHT OF THE CURRENT STATE OF THE ECONOMY & JOB MARKET, DO YOU TRULY BELIEVE THAT RACE DOESNT MATTER AND THAT THE BEST QUALIFIED INDIVIDUALS ARE HIRED FAIRLY & EQUITABLEY? http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/business/economic-scene-sticks-stones-can-break-bones-but-wrong-name-can-make-job-hard.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1?pagewanted=1