What some researchers discovered when they sent 80K fake resumes
A group of economists recently performed an experiment on around 100 of the largest companies in the country, applying for jobs using made-up resumes with equivalent qualifications but different personal characteristics. They changed applicants’ names to suggest that they were white or Black, and male or female — Latisha or Amy, Lamar or Adam.
On Monday, they released the names of the companies. On average, they found, employers contacted the presumed white applicants 9.5% more often than the presumed Black applicants.
Yet this practice varied significantly by firm and industry. One-fifth of the companies — many of them retailers or car dealers — were responsible for nearly half of the gap in callbacks to white and Black applicants.
Two companies favored white applicants over Black applicants significantly more than others.
They were Autonation, a used car retailer, which contacted presumed white applicants 43% more often, and Genuine Parts Co., which sells auto parts including under the NAPA brand, and called presumed white candidates 33% more often.
In a statement, Heather Ross, a spokesperson for Genuine Parts, said, “We are always evaluating our practices to ensure inclusivity and break down barriers, and we will continue to do so.” Autonation did not respond to a request for comment.
Known as an audit study, the experiment was the largest of its kind in the United States: The researchers sent 80,000 resumes to 10,000 jobs from 2019 to 2021. The results demonstrate how entrenched employment discrimination is in parts of the U.S. labor market — and the extent to which Black workers start behind in certain industries.
A lack of racial bias was more common in certain industries: food stores, including Kroger; food products, including Mondelez; freight and transport, including Fedex and Ryder; and wholesale, including Sysco and Mclane Co.
“We want to bring people’s attention not only to the fact that racism is real, sexism is real, some are discriminating, but also that it’s possible to do better, and there’s something to be learned from those that have been doing a good job,” said Patrick Kline, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted the study with Evan K. Rose at the University of Chicago and Christopher R. Walters at Berkeley.
The researchers first published details of their experiment in 2021, but without naming the companies. The new paper, which is set to run in the American Economic Review, names the companies and explains the methodology developed to group them by their performance, while accounting for statistical noise.
The study includes 97 firms. The jobs the researchers applied to were entry level, not requiring a college degree or substantial work experience. In addition to race and gender, the researchers tested other characteristics protected by law, like age and sexual orientation.
They sent up to 1,000 applications to each company, applying for as many as 125 jobs per company in locations nationwide, to try to uncover patterns in companies’ operations versus isolated instances. Then they tracked whether the employer contacted the applicant within 30 days.
Bias against Black names
Companies requiring lots of interaction with customers, like sales and retail, particularly in the auto sector, were most likely to show a preference for applicants presumed to be white. This was true even when applying for positions at those firms that didn’t involve customer interaction, suggesting that discriminatory practices were baked in to corporate culture or human resources practices, the researchers said.
Still, there were exceptions — some of the companies exhibiting the least bias were retailers,
like Lowe’s and Target.
The study may underestimate the rate of discrimination against Black applicants in the labor market as a whole because it tested large companies, which tend to discriminate less, said Lincoln Quillian, a sociologist at Northwestern who analyzes audit studies. It did not include names intended to represent Latino or Asian American applicants, but other research suggests that they are also contacted less than white applicants, though they face less discrimination than Black applicants.
The experiment ended in 2021, and some of the companies involved might have changed their practices since. Still, a review of all available audit studies found that discrimination against Black applicants had not changed in three decades. After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, such discrimination was found to have disappeared among certain employers, but the researchers behind that study said the effect was most likely short-lived.
like Ann Taylor, contacted women 66% more than men.
Neither company to requests comment.
The consequences of being female differed by race. The differences were small, but being female was a slight benefit for white applicants, and a slight penalty for Black applicants. responded for