Better resumes are good, but there are plenty of studies showing bias towards the name alone on a resume and that a white-sounding name gets more bites than names more associated with a minority race.
People have biases, conscious or not. Did you know that women’s positions in orchestras increased greatly after switching to blind auditions? And I can’t find a legit source in 2 min of searching, but there’s also been indication that the sound of high heels affects hiring outcomes even in blind auditions.
Example studies on names and hiring outcomes: 2004, 2023, 2024 (even the “best” companies still showed a 3% bias towards white candidates vs 24% for the worst), 2016
So yeah, there are a fuckton of steps to addressing systemic racism and starting early in the process is a critical step. But the narrative that an equivalent resume is all that’s needed to close the gap is false and dangerous.
Oh, I agree, and I wasn’t trying to suggest what I wrote above was all that’s needed. I’m a big proponent of racially blind admissions/hiring processes. Exclude any data that could be construed as being race-identifying. The more we can force admissions/hiring to base their choices solely on performance-relative metrics alone, the better.
However, I have to admit that such a goal is a bit unrealistic. Race-identifying information will likely always find a way into admissions/hiring processes, simply because of interviews. I don’t claim to know how to create the perfect system, obviously. This is a complex problem that people a lot smarter and more educated than I have been striving to solve for decades.
But I think that raising people up from the very bottom of society is still the best approach, the most efficient way to do that is by focusing on disadvantages experienced early in life. If you can level the playing field during kindergarten, you provide a more equal launch pad for every stage of life thereafter; keep working up from there and we’ll eventually wind up with a more equal result in adulthood.
Better resumes are good, but there are plenty of studies showing bias towards the name alone on a resume and that a white-sounding name gets more bites than names more associated with a minority race.
People have biases, conscious or not. Did you know that women’s positions in orchestras increased greatly after switching to blind auditions? And I can’t find a legit source in 2 min of searching, but there’s also been indication that the sound of high heels affects hiring outcomes even in blind auditions.
Example studies on names and hiring outcomes: 2004, 2023, 2024 (even the “best” companies still showed a 3% bias towards white candidates vs 24% for the worst), 2016
So yeah, there are a fuckton of steps to addressing systemic racism and starting early in the process is a critical step. But the narrative that an equivalent resume is all that’s needed to close the gap is false and dangerous.
Oh, I agree, and I wasn’t trying to suggest what I wrote above was all that’s needed. I’m a big proponent of racially blind admissions/hiring processes. Exclude any data that could be construed as being race-identifying. The more we can force admissions/hiring to base their choices solely on performance-relative metrics alone, the better.
However, I have to admit that such a goal is a bit unrealistic. Race-identifying information will likely always find a way into admissions/hiring processes, simply because of interviews. I don’t claim to know how to create the perfect system, obviously. This is a complex problem that people a lot smarter and more educated than I have been striving to solve for decades.
But I think that raising people up from the very bottom of society is still the best approach, the most efficient way to do that is by focusing on disadvantages experienced early in life. If you can level the playing field during kindergarten, you provide a more equal launch pad for every stage of life thereafter; keep working up from there and we’ll eventually wind up with a more equal result in adulthood.