What Researchers Discovered When They Sent 80k Fake Résumés to U.S. Jobs

But what I can change is my behavior that doesnt involve millisecond reaction times. I can use empirical data to make hiring choices. I can stop using phrases like "culture fit" or making decisions based on intuition of how I feel about someone.

I can do my part to fight cognitive bias by acknowledging it exists and by choosing to do better and make decisions with data, but I can't even trust myself to create the criteria for evaluation without polluting it with my own biases.

I am not sure why I am posting this. Probably because I want to remind myself that growing up in the rural Midwest put ideas in my head that while I reject them rationally, they have polluted deep parts or my brain that form a large part of my intuition-based decisions.

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.

…

On average, companies did not treat male and female applicants differently. This aligns with other research showing that gender discrimination against women is rare in entry-level jobs, and starts later in careers.

However, when companies did favor men (especially in manufacturing) or women (mostly at apparel stores), the biases were much larger than for race.

...

Being gay, as indicated by including membership in an L.G.B.T.Q. club on the résumé, resulted in a slight penalty for white applicants, but benefited Black applicants — although the effect was small, when this was on their résumés, the racial penalty disappeared.”

That’s more positive than I expected from the headline! The problems are improving and concentrating.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1756-2171.12...

Working paper doi: 10.3386/w32313