What’s in a name?
When teaching my class, I try to show the lasting reality of racism in society by finding current examples. These days, the examples often include instances of racial profiling. One such example that I often use relates to racial profiling not through looks, but through names.
I sometimes have my students read the ABC News article Can a ‘Black’ Name Affect Job Prospects? The author describes an experiment where people with black sounding names make two sets of resumes. Other than the name, the resumes are identical. One resume set has the black sounding name, and the other resume has a more white-sounding name. Seventeen percent more of the time, callbacks were received for resumes with the more white-sounding names. One participant received callbacks for the white-sounding name for three weeks, while receiving no callbacks during the same time span for resumes with her actual black sounding name.
In the more recent article ‘Whitening’ the Résumé, Michael Luo discusses a similar phenomenon. Job searcher’s in Luo’s article not only made changes to their names, but also removed other race indicators from their resumes. Such race indicators even included education for one who attended a historically black college.
While my first name is probably fairly uncommon in any race, I do believe that, when first read, people think “white.” My last name can go either way, but in this region, it is probably more of a tip-off that I am not white. I guess it still baffles some, though. Believe me. I have seen some surprised faces when I have shown up for interviews saying that I was, in fact, Ursula.
It has not been so much my name that I have worried about when applying to jobs, but my address. When applying to a job in the suburbs, I did often feel as if my address might be an indicator of race or even class.
Then, of course, there are the interviews where you know that race has something to do with how they treat you and whether or not you will get the job.
This does not stop at race either. If employers can tell whether or not you are male or female, it may count against you. If an industry is rife with males, I may sometimes have second thoughts about even applying because it is obvious that I am female.
I always have to wonder, though, if an employer incorporates resume analyzing practices like this, then do I really want to work for such an employer anyway? This raises another question. Should we even bother to make such adjustments to fit into society’s box for just a chance at a job that maybe we should not even consider because of its practices? We have to eat right?
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