Ethnic Names, Resumes, and Occupational stereotypes: Will D'Money Get the Job?

King, Madera, Hebl, and Knight (2006) found evidence that race-typed names can have significant influence on the evaluation of resumes. Specifically, they found significant differences between Asian, Hispanic, Black and White-sounding names. They also found that occupational stereotypes covaried the relationship between names and evaluation. The current study expanded on their research by manipulating race with new groups (White, Asian Indian, Nigerian, Muslim, and Non-traditional Black-sounding names), manipulating the quality of the resume (low, high), and by considering occupational stereotypes (low-status, high-status) as an explanatory mechanism. Participants who have claimed hiring experience (N=170) from several fields read a fictitious resume, gave an overall evaluation of the applicant, and judged the applicant’s suitability for several occupations. A factorial analysis indicated that people who make hiring decisions do not evaluate applicants differently based on their name alone. Participants were able to evaluate candidates according to their resume, such that candidates with high-quality resumes received better evaluations than those with low-quality resumes. Also, no significant interaction of race and resume quality was found. Occupational stereotypes could not be explored as a covariate due to the lack of significant difference in names. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1:Introduction . 1 Importance of Resumes . 3 Occupational Stereotypes . 5 Asian Indians . 8 Nigerians . 10 Muslims . 11 Blacks and Non-traditional Names . 14 Hypotheses . 17 CHAPTER II: Methods . 19 Participants . 19 Design . 20 Materials and Procedure . 20 CHAPTER III: Results . 24 Overall Evaluation . 25 Table 1. Means and standard errors of overall evaluations for race and resume . 25 Low-Status Occupational Suitability . 25 High-Status Occupational Suitability . 26 Figure 1. High-occupational suitability of targets as a function of race and resume . 27 CHAPTER IV: Discussion . 29 CHAPTER V: References . 36 CHAPTER VI: Appendices . 45 Overall Evaluation Items . 45 Resume A: High Quality . 47 Resume B: Low Quality . 48 ETHNIC NAMES, RESUMES, AND OCCUPATIONAL STEREOTYPES 1 CHAPTER 1 The lack of diversity has become a growing concern for organizations, as it is an important asset in gaining competitive advantage and has coincided with social and legislative pushes for equal opportunity amongst historically disadvantaged groups (Noe, 2005). Although extensive progress has been made to alleviate discrimination since the Civil Rights era, barriers to minority access in the workplace still remain. Due to legal advances in equal rights, discrimination has become more covert and displays of prejudice have become subtler in nature, an example being interpersonal discrimination occurring in interviews (Hebl, Foster, Mannix, & Dovidio, 2002). One of the first barriers minorities may face is the name on their resumes. A name can imply one’s race and subsequent characteristics associated with that race; for example, Jose Gonzalez would elicit a Mexican image while Jamal Jenkins would elicit an image of a Black man. Bertrand and Mullainathan (2002) found that the race-typed names on identical resumes had a significant effect on the number of callbacks for interviews; specifically, Whitesounding names like Emily and Brad elicited about 50% more callbacks than Blacksounding names such as Aisha and Jermaine. Previous research has also shown that racial names can be associated with an occupational stereotype, a “preconceived attitude about a particular occupation, about people who are employed in that occupation, or about one’s suitability for that occupation” (Lipton, O’Connor, Terry, & Bellamy, 1991). A key study by King, Madera, Hebl, and Knight (2006), which will be replicated in this study, found that different racial names on ETHNIC NAMES, RESUMES, AND OCCUPATIONAL STEREOTYPES 2 two resumes, one high and one low-quality, had different evaluations. The high quality resume and low quality resume both had the same organizations, clubs, and amount of information. However, the high quality resume had a higher GPA (3.9 to 2.7), more leadership experience in their organizations and clubs (president instead of member), and presented more competent abilities than the low quality resume. To elicit racial content, they used the following names to represent each group: “Lee Chang” for Asians, “James Sullivan” for Whites, “Jose Gonzalez” for Hispanics, and “Jamal Jenkins” for Black applicants. Then they had participants rate the high and low quality resumes with the applicant’s name being the only difference. They found that the Asian American applicants were evaluated highly for high status jobs regardless of resume quality, White and Hispanic applicants benefited from high-quality resumes, and Black applicant were evaluated negatively, even with strong credentials. However, they found that occupational stereotypes accounted for the relationship between race and evaluations of applicants. Specifically, the effect of race on overall evaluations and the interactions between race and resume quality did not approach significance after controlling for occupational stereotypes. For example, the Black sounding “Jamal Jenkins” had lower evaluations overall but when the controlling for occupational stereotypes, which rated Jamal as more suitable for low status jobs, he was no longer evaluated differently from other racial groups. Whether intentional or not, employment discrimination where job-irrelevant factors like somebody’s name are taken into consideration can have detrimental results to organizations seeking diversity and more importantly, severe implications for minority ETHNIC NAMES, RESUMES, AND OCCUPATIONAL STEREOTYPES 3 applicants. The following study will expand on King et al.’s (2002) study on White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic applicants by introducing Indian names, Nigerian names, Muslim names, and for lack of a better term: non-traditional Black names, which are colloquially known as stereotypical “ghetto names”. The literature on Muslims and Asian Indians in employment discrimination is extremely limited and research on Nigerian Americans in work contexts is virtually nonexistent. Studies that address Black discrimination usually refer to traditional Black names such as Jamal, Tyrone, Keisha, and Latoya (Bertrand & Mullanathan, 2002). But what about non-traditional names like D’Money, Imamirical, La-a (prounounced Ledasha), and Alize? How do names influence the perceptions of selection personnel in prescreening resumes? Will D’Money Jackson and James Sullivan be evaluated the same way when their credentials are identical? This is the focus of the current study. The Importance of Resumes The importance of resumes in the selection process cannot be overstated due to their prevalence as the “most frequently used selection practice by organizations. even more common than use of the employment interview” (Dipboye & Jackson, 1999 as cited in Cole, Field, Giles, & Harris, 2009). It is likely that every selection decision includes an 1 Originally, I wanted to differentiate Blacks (African‐Americans: those brought over through the Atlantic Slave Trade) from Africans (those who have a recent and direct lineage from countries in Africa) because the names and culture that comes with each heritage can be vastly different. However, it is important to note the diversity of countries within Africa, so it could not be merely “African” names. For this reason, I chose to focus on the Nigerian population, which has the highest representation of direct African ancestry in the United States at 253,000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). ETHNIC NAM