Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

The "very clear language" you speak of actually created gaps in the law which ostensibly still abided by the letter. For instance, the SEP article on affirmative action[0] notes that employers, faced with the new act, would remove the pipeline which funneled black people into maintenance jobs but add a requirement such that anyone over a certain number of years at the company would not be allowed to transfer to another department. While seeming fair in according to 'race, color, religion, sex or national origin' its intent and effect was to trap the older black workers (who were of course all hired into maintenance divisions) in their current job and stop them from moving up.

>Thus, preferential affirmative action in the workplace served the same rationale as the non-preferential sort. Its purpose was not to compensate for past wrongs, offset unfair advantage, appropriately reward the deserving, or yield a variety of social goods; its purpose was to change institutions so they could comply with the nondiscrimination mandate of the Civil Rights Act.

In fact, some philosophers have argued that merely receiving the fruits produced by injustice is enough to make one personally liable to compensate a victim for the injustice.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-action/

The spirit of the Civil Rights movement was to address lingering injustices that particularly affected the descendants of victims of the Atlantic slave trade. For a couple of decades, the spirit and intent of the law were coalescing, via affirmative action and other bias-busting policy.

I think that someone along your thought process could make a strong case that the spirit of the Civil Rights movement has changed, that the intent should change with it, that an attempt was made (a somewhat successful attempt actually) to raise the social standing of the descendants of the victims of the Atlantic slave to a place that reflects their contributions to our nation, that now other groups have been left behind and need some attention. You could make this case, and I think you’d find a lot of agreement. But, and I say this as respectfully as possible, don’t be so obtuse to why the Civil Rights movement happened to think that it’s interesting how language changes.

It most definitely is not illegal. Many colleges have race and gender based quota systems. Governments have race and gender quota systems. Many federal, state and local governments set aside X percentage of their contracts solely for minority or female owned businesses.

Whether this is right or wrong is another debate. But race, gender or "diversity" hiring or recruiting certainly isn't illegal. It happens all the time.

At first I felt the same way because I may be a beneficiary of these types of policies. Who likes being a charity case? But then I realized that this is just work, and I don't really care. If it gets me closer to a comfortable retirement more quickly, so be it. Ends, means, etc.

Edit: I'm speaking about opportunities in general. The selection policy described by GP would put me at a disadvantage because I have a completely Anglo name.

if you think hiring is a fair meritocracy you are naive.

Good looking people tend get hired more often. Get higher salaries.

And getting hired is often about good your network is. And the richer you are or your parents are, the likelier you are to get an internship or a coveted job because you are around the "right" people.

And there is also Cronyism, which I have realized is more prevalent that I thought as my career has advanced.

As a woman with a physical disability, idgaf, I just want a job. I'm quite confident in my own abilities and require no external validation.

In the case that parent commenter described, you would be invited to the interview based on your qualifications and your color, but would be hired based on your demonstrated abilities during the interviews.

Because of the way subconscious prejudice works, unless you put a finger on the scale in the other direction then all the white guys are hired (in part) because of their appearance.

Subconscious bias means your concern is applicable regardless of your skin color or gender. If you’re a white male, you could easily have been hired simply because of your skin color and gender and not your abilities. Effectively, your point is moot. Maybe worry less about the thoughts and feelings of who hired you and focus on doing your best work.

Again, I really hope it's clear that we don't deliberately hire unqualified candidate because they're considered diverse. It only affects resume reviews and phone interviews which are basically coin tosses.

For any competitive position, you will have candidates with little to nothing separating them. Interviews are not standardized tests where there are easily measurable quantitative differences.

Would you "hate to work" at a place if you found out you were hired because they thought "you were a good culture fit", rather than your actual abilities?

"For what it's worth I don't think our diversity hiring practices result in any lowered caliber of hires. Most of the affirmative hiring policies only affect resume review and technical phone interviews." As the post being responded to.

I'd have to agree. I mean, lets imagine how this sounds by just swapping some words and tell me if it's still okay:

>I suspect many companies wouldn't use this as it would make affirmative hiring policies more difficult. For example, recruiters at my company curate lists of names that are majority male, white, or Western (pulled from the census bureau) in order to try and determine which candidates are... can't think of a good word for here.

Yup. Pro tip, give your kid a name like "Rafael".

I trust our company's lawyers as to whether or not this is legal. Race does not directly affect hiring decisions. It only affects resume review and phone screen. So it does affect the population that get to the on-site. But functionally this doesn't seem much different than say, recruiting at an HBCU.

It's also possible that companies which try to optimize hiring of knowledge workers with varying degrees of talent based on the ethnicity of their name will perform poorly over the long run, so being disadvantaged in the hiring process is actually an advantage for your career as a whole.

It's a double edged sword. In tech, it's been found that blind hiring processes where candidates' name, education, and past employers are obscured (a third party broadly describes the education and work experience but doesn't give any explicit names) does result in more hires from less prestigious universities and companies. But it does make the hired population more male and more white & Asian. I think triplebyte did a study.

I think you should point out what "public school" means in Britain, otherwise there is a 100% chance that any Americans who aren't aware of that definition will misunderstand your comment.

(In the US, the term "public school" means what you mean by "state school", afaict).

> It's not just a matter of hitting targets - the alternative is that everyone who gets in is from a wealthy family or went to a top fee paying school.

This doesn't follow. The alternative is getting whatever the ratio of <people from wealthy families>/<people from underprivileged/nontraditional backgrounds> is. So following your argument, the people from underprivileged backgrounds that meet the "all things being equal" test must be an insignificant amount.

It's kind of unfair to compare raw stats of kids who went to elite prep schools vs poor public schools.

Like I was thinking about the amount of activities, tutors, private school my SO and I could pay for if we had a kid. And it was kind of insane to compare that versus what we grew up with, and how different our own HS resumes would have been with the same level of resources.

Randomization solves for the problem, that's true, but that isn't what people are arguing when they criticize social science research like this.

Theoretically, if you have X number of factors you can't control for, then there should be some threshold Y where the sample size benefits from random selection and accounts for those factors. Right now, social scientists have formulas they use to establish what is and is not an acceptable population when doing experiments like this.

The problem that is being identified (and can't be stated often enough, honestly) is that human emotional preferences and variability of experience means that X is far more variable than anyone can conceive. A human being is an extremely complex biological system and that complexity compounds when you begin comparing people to one another and in groups. So unless you are actively controlling for every possible factor in that system, the assumption that you can use any formula to establish a reasonable population size Y is absurd.

Anyone with half a brain can see this, but social science has to deliver on a product and justify its existence with research funding, so it developed standards - like the aforementioned formulas - that allow it to ignore the problem of identifying X and instead just assuming their synthetic Y will do.

This is the real reason why psychologists have a replication crisis and why they always will. Many of them don't even use the standards they have because honestly, they all realize it's nonsense to begin with.

Or, if you're white and think everybody is overthinking this, just call yourself Jamal.

Unfortunately there is no clear answer to that, I'm latino but living and working in a south american country so its irrelevant; but I have searched for jobs overseas (remote) and a few times I have landed the job.

I saw another study where they found phone numbers for mental health professionals, and they called and left a message, asking someone to call them back to set up a first appointment.

The had other people rate the voices as "sounds black" / "sounds white," and "sounds white-collar" / "sounds blue-collar."

That way, they measured the correlation between "sounds black" and "doesn't get call backs."

As you can imagine, "white" sounding people got more call backs. And "white-collar" sounding people got more call backs. I don't know if they reported which was more beneficial, sounding white, or white-collar.

My point being, if you have a large enough collection of names, and you measure how the candidate appears to them, you can then correlate the appearance with the outcome, showing the bias against that appearance.

You don't need to have the researchers generate their own candidates.

Yep. One of our presidents was Japanese-Peruvian, and I went to school in Peru with a few people with Japanese first and last names.

And his dad, Martin Sheen's birth name was Ramón Gerard Antonio Estévez

That's probably why his brother, Emilio Estevez was never able to make it as an actor, having a meager 47 acting credits over the course of 45 years https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000389/?ref_=nv_sr_1

I understand. Whether the candidate, a researcher, or my in-house recruiter mangles the name, the end effect is the same.

Yes, but name and resume work history generally is unique enough, especially at the senior levels. There are five pages of results on LinkedIn for John Carmack. I suspect that you and I have the exact same John Carmack in mind, though.

"Millennial" here.

stcredzero.

Street credit. Usually referred to as social status in the neighborhood and local friend groups. Usually used by rappers and African American neighborhoods. However, people living in these neighborhoods don't actually say this today. Typically middle and high school students hear this on TV/radio and use it in their own (usually upper/middle class) circles to increase their social status.

Zero refers to zero street cred. Username plays a pun, the the user actually has zero cred. Again, only used by people outside the "street" aka in middle and high school. Also 98% chance OP is male. I'd say 50-60% white, sice we're on HN. With the other 40-50% being Asian or Indian.

In summary, yes, usernames tell you a lot.

I'm guessing it stands for "street cred zero" as in having zero street credibility.

Wiktionary defines "street cred" as:

> Credibility among young, hip urban dwellers; particularly important in the hip-hop and rap scenes.

Google defines it somewhat more tersely as:

> acceptability among young black urban residents

Given that the user name says the user has no street cred, it's ironic that people would assume the user is "urban".

I have to confess I dug into the comments before I realized this wasn't St. Credzero and having made a mental note go to look him up.

They could use a different username on HN than Reddit.