Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A lot of behaviour is obvious in aggregate but hard to identify in particular cases.

If you make a job posting, get 5 applicants, interview 3 of them and hire 1 it's hard to point a finger and say you did (or didn't) do anything wrong.

But let's say over the course of a year you receive 10,000 applications for various positions and 15% of those are African American. Now say that 10% of applicants get to the interview stage but none of the African American applicants made it to the interview stage then, in the very least, that looks bad. You would need to justify why that's the case.

Discrimination can be subtle. A lot of people who are discriminatory but don't think they are. In the US, for example, you have what are called "second syllable names". These are names that are traditionally AFrican American (eg Lakisha). I vaguely recall reading a study where someone took a bunch of resumes for assistant positions and for a bunch with "first syllable names" they replaced just the name with "second syllable names" and there was a statistically significant decrease in response rate.

So your personal discretion doesn't extend to unlawful hiring and firing practices.

Sidestepping the parent (and the mention of the studies; I have heard of but not read them) to ask you a question:

Where did you find/learn the term "second syllable name" and "first syllable name"? I tried looking it up and struck out (aside from some requests for baby names like that), though it's quite descriptive and makes perfect sense.

It did lead me to the wikipedia article [0] about African-American names, which enlightened me a bit on the origins of some of those.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_names

I believe (but I'm not 100% certain) that I personally first heard this term when I heard about these studies. I remember it because it's something that hadn't occurred to me.

But that's the thing: your mind is capable of making these subconscious connections. So if you happen to be discriminatory against African Americans, names are going to be a signal whether you realize it or not.

I'm oddly reminded of some TikToks I've seen recently where people talk about how they're unintentionally conditioned their dogs with things like "Thank you, good meeting" as something they always say at the end of a Zoom call and their dogs perk up because they know they're going to get attention, go for a walk or whatever.

Forming a connection doesn't require intent from either party.

Thanks for the follow-up!

I'm very aware of the biases that I gained growing up in my household and do my absolute best to crush them. That's why this term stuck out to me; it's not something I had heard but makes absolute sense when I look at how people in my family react to names.

It's a common trope in standup comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKLTsqyzqmc

This reminds me of a practice a recruiter used to boast when I applied for a job - throwing half the applications in the shredder without even reading them because they didn’t want to work with “unlucky people”. Albeit I was mildly curious about what mental gymnastics the person did to end up with such a frivolous way of not doing his job, I never left a building quicker ever since.

This is an old hiring manager joke that's been around for enough decades that someone was sure to try it.

Yeah, with the additional punchline that "the lucky ones were the half that got shredded as they didn't need to deal with the hiring manager."

Someone company or gov organisation I can't recall who removed all names and gender data from their application process, it decreased the likelyhood of a woman getting hired. Everyone keeps saying we're all stained with some original sin of not being able to hire without awful biases, we're not to be trusted with our own thoughts.

Ah found the thing I was talking about: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...

While that trial didn’t have the desired result, didn’t it show or at least strongly suggest that gender and background are factors in recruiting in aggregate?

We can speculate what this means. One possibility is that the Australian public service overcompensates for gender bias by having a lower bar for female candidates. I can’t say if that’s true but this does seem to support the idea that some increase diversity with a lower hiring bar.

I remember the study about "second syllable names" and I remember a lot of people justifying it. "A good candidate would use a 'professional' sounding name".

And I'm sure none of those people justifying it in such a manner would similarly reject candidates that used a false name on their first pass for "acting in a dishonest manner". It's sort of a damned if you do damned if you don't situation unless you're cool going by Steve for the next few years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com