PhD gets 5x increase in postdoc interview invitations by just changing his name

Dang! That’s interesting. Just give this post time.

Not commenting on that post because I didn’t see it but just noting. Some people support affirmative action. There are arguments that can be used that are somewhat convincing. Correcting generational feedback loops is hard and may require more than just blind indifference. Personally I think affirmative action can go too far, but it is very much a live issue in politics for good reason. Meanwhile there aren’t many who would say discrimination against people from the Middle East is good

Do you know why the other post was flagged?

Any chance you can find the link to the dead post? I am curious to see it.

The post referenced:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32880510

As the comments show, the submission had other issues.

I haven't flagged either that post or this one, but I understand why people do. Both present useless anecdotes that tell us nothing about whether or not a systemic problem exists.

Academia is full of problems like these.

This only leads to resentment and a reinforcement of the idea that women have it on 'easy mode', which I don't think is caused by them in the first place.

One day I went to interview at SiB (https://www.sib.swiss/) as part of a cohort of 20 shortlisted from all over the world. Women on our cohort were treated significantly better, with a couple weird professors were behind them all the time. Everyone noticed that (even other girls) and we actually, explicitly, touched on that subject on our free time.

I recall there was one dinner by the end of that trip and these guys made one particular girl sit in between them, which was kind of awkward as students were all sitting together in a different part of the table. One of these guys was all over the girl, to clarify: not touching her, but physically very close all the time and asking a lot of trivial questions one after the other (do you like food XXXX? have you been to XXXX? what do you think of XXXX?), the girl was visibly uncomfortable but what was she supposed to do? We were all about 20yo at that time, at that age (also a newgrad) you just go with the flow. Plenty of people take advantage of that.

Not implying anything but, as anecdata, that girl got accepted into the program under the supervision of that particular guy. I hope she had a comfortable PhD stay and I mean that with all honesty.

Wouldn't that in all cases benefit the real CV over the fake one? (because if you started to look up the fake person you'd find less useful results than for the real name, which would turn up real publications)

So they favored the made up person?

I wouldn't say that all postdocs are extremely specific in a field like plant biology. You might require the postdoc to be knowledgable of certain lab practices only for example.

In fact, in many cases it is very unlikely that you will find a postdoc that has done work in a cutting-edge niche area that a professor is interested in, so the pool of candidates even globally is not sufficient. Your best hope is to find a postdoc in an adjacent area who you can train up on what you are doing.

Indeed it is not a rigours experiment by any stretch of the imagination. But the difference in scale in response (and the fact his profile looks earnest) we have an interesting data point on bias in academia.

The crazy thing is he says 54 people were willing to accept a fellowship from his Western name. How does that work, exactly? In his application he communicates that he also has a fellowship available that he could give to the people he is applying to? It doesn't make sense to me.

It is still visible on Nitter instances (e.g. https://nitter.priv.pw/Mohamad_IPS/status/157121403293739417...)

At the stage of shortlisting for the interview, a lot of people don't actually go out and check the paper, they just register it is published in a good journal, they might do a deep dive when preparing for the interview if at all.

Especially in a field like plant biology, papers probably have many authors, so even if you check the paper you might not pay attention to the author list (or he could have chosen a name that looks like one of the co-authors in some of his papers?)

The method is in the tweet and we're peer reviewing the tweet right now.

Well, he was telling a lie.

Great point. This is exactly why no one should use their native names in job applications.

It's actually worst than I made out in the title. The responses he got under his original name were "almost all negative", not actual invitations. While almost all the response under his pseudonym were positive, some getting out of their way to pull him in.

the post was entirely made up, as acknowledged by the author

Sure, we can give the benefit of the doubt that most were unconscious about it. But the scale of difference in the response rate means that we also can't rule out that there were a minority who rejected him because they are basically racist.

I doubt it's so UNconscious. I know enough people that would straight up filter any muslim out from working with them.

Nothing unconscious with that bias, quite the opposite.

Western name: 100 samples, 87 responses, 54 positive.

Islamic name: 100 samples, 17 responses, 0 positive.

That's not a "good example of unconscious bias". Unless there's something else going on here (one or both of the names used in the experiment had some sort of reputation in the community already, or some other aspects of the CV were changed in the experiment), this is an absolutely stunning result and evidence of very conscious bigotry. This is a Black person applying for a job in 1920s Atlanta kind of result. In 2022 academia!