Unemployed Black Woman Pretends to be White, Job Offers Skyrocket (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Unemployed Black Woman Pretends to be White, Job Offers Skyrocket (2012)

techyville.com

Since there were only 5 comments, I was hoping to get in before my fellow white people began the search for every possible explanation other than the obvious one. Alas, no.

Her experience is exactly in line with previous studies on this. E.g.:

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

And plenty of other people have stories like this to tell. For example, this white guy with a gender-ambiguous name who suddenly got a lot more attention when he added "Mr" to his resume:

http://qz.com/103453/i-understood-gender-discrimination-afte...

And it's not just resumes. Bias also happens in real-world auditions:

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/A94/90/73G00/

The truth is that most of us are unconsciously biased against and for all sorts of people. I sure am. I didn't used to admit that, even to myself, but then I took some of the Project Implicit tests:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

The question isn't whether white people have some sort of in-group bias. People have all sorts of in-group biases, and white people are people.

The question is what we do about them. More specifically, the question for you is what you, as a human, are doing about your biases. And the question for me is what I'm doing about mine.

Yes exactly and this is why we need to read these kind of things. It seems one of the more challenging aspects of racism today is that is so subtle that most people with racial bias are not even really aware of it themselves.

>my fellow white people began the search for every possible explanation

contrary to your idea of white people having white guilt or whatever and trying to justify this, the posts in this thread indicate (rightly) that discrimination exists and that you deal with it and get over it.

Are you discriminated against? If you're a white male (like me), this is too funny!

"The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting. Gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter." - http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

I'm pretty sure that personal experiences of discrimination qualify as "intensely but shallowly interesting" content. It's "intense" because racial/sexual/etc. discrimination is a very charged topic that people get passionate about. (Not that this is bad, it's just the current state of things.)

It's "shallowly interesting" because it doesn't teach us anything except "some companies are racist sometimes", which everyone already knows. If companies in field X are especially racist, that might be interesting. If specific company Y was really racist, that might be interesting. If people were more or less racist under circumstance Z, that might be interesting, etc. But since this kind of content doesn't name specifics, all we can take away is "some employers are racist sometimes under some circumstances" (according to one person, whose account might or might not be completely accurate). That hasn't been new information since, well, ever. Even if you went back to 1900, everyone would already know this, it's just that most people would agree with it, instead of objecting like modern-day people would.

Agreed. Let's just ignore this. Next article please.

This attitude reeks of white privilege, although I used to have an opinion similar to it. I recommend spending some time here:

http://racismschool.tumblr.com/post/16976192868/white-privil...

I strongly disagree. Not everybody knows that racism exists, and not everybody agrees that it is a significant barrier to hiring.

Further, it is not a solved problem, so it is well worth talking about it so we can solve it. Even if you don't believe that it should be solved as a societal problem (I do), this is a sign to hiring managers that they can do especially well by looking for the sorts of people that many companies tend to miss.

Not sure why this user gets downvoted, while the parent comment gets upvoted. Maybe this related to the belief of meritocracy that many have in Silicon Valley.

>It's "shallowly interesting" because it doesn't teach us anything except "some companies are racist sometimes", which everyone already knows.

I think you got it wrong. It doesn't have to teach you anything new. It's not here to amuse you. It's here to enrage you and get you to do something about it.

Now, if you are white, you might not find it amusing or interesting at all. But if you are black, you can see into it something that fucks you chances, and that's not funny at all, even if it's not novel or "everyone already knows".

>That hasn't been new information since, well, ever. Even if you went back to 1900, everyone would already know this, it's just that most people would agree with it, instead of objecting like modern-day people would.

Yes, and in 2050 they might say:

"Even if you went back to 2013, everyone would already know this, it's just that most people would not care, because it was not novel or interesting, instead of getting enraged and trying to fix this as a modern-day people would."

I mean, to me it's not very unlike reading about lynchings in 1910, and saying: "Well, OK, this is not news, such things happen for two centuries. Next news item please".

Sure, but the purpose of HN is specifically to teach people things, and not to create rage. The site guidelines make that pretty clear.

Also, is our problem really that people don't get outraged enough about race? We've had a number of days-long, city-wide street riots about race. That's an awful lot of rage we have already.

I would find this position more credible if people were downvoting and admonishing all the tech, business, privacy, and government rage.

You may personally be sincere, and if you have been equally assiduous on all upsetting topics, I commend you. But more generally, I think the sudden tone-policing that appears on race and gender discrimination topics has much more to do with the topic than the tone.

I agree with you...SO MUCH... you don't even know. Has anyone on HN checked out Google+?. Particularly, anytime the official Google account "LifeAtGoogle" posts anything about promoting/highlighting african-americans? It turns into a crazy 100+ comments thread of arguments..every..single..time. I don't see this kind of thing when someone posts about Chinese new-year, or just about any other event about any other group of people. I made the mistake of getting involved in one of those G+ threads and getting myself[1] all heated. Now I don't bother trying to debate. I'm just sad that anytime anything attempting to highlight positive things, or problems, for african-americans turns into a storm of comments almost completely drowning out the original article/story.

1.myself=blackmale

EDIT: And now this story has disappeared from the front page superfast(less than 45mins), while the the one about a lady adding "Mr." to her resume remains on front page(For at least 3 hrs now)......

For what it's worth, I'm indeed annoyed at how much front page content has been about the NSA recently, but that issue will eventually blow over. We've been fighting about racism ever since the Three-Fifths Clause was included in the Constitution, over two hundred years ago.

People were saying that. People were flagging those stories. Some people lost their flagging rights because they flagged too much.

As a white male with a black girlfriend: No we don't get outraged enough about racism.

The amount of people who don't get what white privilege is or why saying the N-word isn't okay is astounding.

> "It's here to enrage you"

HN submissions are supposed to "gratif[y] one's intellectual curiosity".

If your "intellectual curiosity" can stand idle when black people are denied access to jobs and opportunies, then it's not worth much in the first place. I'd go as far as to call it dead.

"Intellectual curiosity" is not IDLE curiosity. It either is curiosity about building and changing things (including society) or it's no better than stamp collecting.

> ""Intellectual curiosity" is not IDLE curiosity."

I agree.

"Intellectual curiosity" is also not mere rage, nor mere social activism [0]. Those things are not what the Hacker News frontpage is for. Intellectual curiosity does require something to be either novel material, or presented in a novel way; this is neither.

[0] Want to build and change society? Come join us at http://www.teachindenver.com/teachindenver/denver-fellows-pr... . As a bonus, it will gratify your intellectual curiosity.

I found the article interesting, but upon reading apsec112's comment, it's probably true that this doesn't really belong on HN. That you say "It's here to enrage you and get you to do something about it." furthers my view that this is an article more appropriate for Reddit than HN. Of course as reddit becomes more exclusively memes and funny pictures, it's not surprising that many people are using HN for the type of content that would have been found on reddit 5 years ago.

I guess my point is, I read apsec112's comment as purely about whether the article belongs on HN, not whether the article was good or interesting (which it was).

Nobody said it's "not news." They just said it doesn't suit this particular special-interest news site's standards. Similarly, if Apple were to buy out Facebook tomorrow, that would definitely be news, but it would probably be inappropriate for a My Little Pony news site.

IMHO, the world would be infinitely better if people did not compartmentalize issues. Especially important issues.

This has been studied more formally as well, here is one paper from 2004: http://scholar.harvard.edu/mullainathan/files/emilygreg.pdf

They found only a 50% increase in call-backs for "white sounding" names, still I think this story is quite credible.

"only" a 50% increase?

In the submitted article the difference was much larger; she got 9 call-backs with the white name versus 0 with her ethnic name.

"Ethnic" is not a synomym of "non-white."

I didn't say it was. The author of the submitted article used this term to describe her name though.

Isn't it likely that Monster has some sort of "freshness" indicator that might rank new profiles higher than old ones that haven't been updated in a while?

A better experiment would have been to create two similar profiles at the same time with the only difference being the name and diversity questionnaire.

At some point her real resume was fresh, and it doesn't sound like she experienced the same level of response then that she received on her fake fresh resume. Of course maybe the insurance industry wasn't hiring as eagerly when her real resume was fresh. Oh well, let's just assume it's experiment error and her conclusions are baseless. There, I feel better.

I actually added this link to run an experiment. I have been playing around a lot with the nltk package and after I saw the one link similar to this on the front page, I remembered that this story got flagged for not being techie enough. So now that we are getting a discussion going I can run sentiment analyses on the comments to text for variances on different levels.

You've now contaminated your experimental results.

I look forward to seeing the results. This story is already off the front page despite clearly deserving to be there from vote counts. Feel free to email me if I can help.

I understand discrimination is real and I wasn't implying otherwise. But I also worked in the past for a monster competitor and I can say that at least at the company I worked for "new" candidates were promoted much more than existing candidates.

Hiring managers would much rather see an email titled "20 new candidates for your XYZ position!" than "20 people who haven't updated their profile in 2 years for your XYZ position".

Creating two profiles at the same time would eliminate this issue, although employers might then wonder why 2 candidates have the exact same profiles...

Well, dismissing her experience based on a "freshness rating" hypothesis wouldn't be justified, but she does say that she had "used [Monster] in the past and...been successful in obtaining jobs through it."

Meanwhile the supreme court continues to attempt to rollback protections for equal treatment like society is all grown up now.

ps. this article seems like dejavu, I swear I've read it before here

How does this get flagged off so quickly when there's a sexism article on the frontpage?

"She had no prior work experience and had applied for a clerical position, but was offered a higher post as an executive manager making close to six figures"

Does this anecdote not sound crazy to anyone else? Racial discrimination by name is well documented in other studies, but her classmate's experience seems implausible.

I think the situation is crazy but the story is entirely plausible.

It could happen in a good way. We've all met absurdly bright young hackers whose resumes haven't yet caught up with their talents. Or even proto-hackers; there are several people I've encouraged to get into the field because they obviously had the right inclinations and a background that would make them great. Maybe this hiring manager saw a lot of raw talent they thought they could put to work. I know a couple of people who ended up managers very young and were great at it.

Or it could happen in a bad way. We can all think of people we're working with and said, "How in the world did they get that job?" Idiocy, venality, lust, nepotism, or even reasonable mistakes. And let's not forget the "B players hire C players" phenomenon.

Either way, I am not shocked at all that things like that happen.

Correlation does not imply causation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

No but it is cause for concern.

This has been confirmed in other studies -- that people with white sounding names do better than those with "black" sounding names on resumes, all things being equal. Our country is incredibly structurally racist is the moral of the story.

Agreed, but it does sound like she was pretty careful in which factors in the experiment were allowed to vary, and unless she's exaggerating the numbers (which is hard to do when you enumerate specifics), that's a pretty significant change. I would be more sceptical if someone pointed out factors that might have varied anyway.

edit: The comment about 'profile freshness' is intriguing, and possible an example of this.

Causation implies correlation though. That is, correlation is a necessary condition for causation.

As I heard it explained once: correlation does not imply causation, but it does jump up and down and point and gesticulate wildly in its general direction.

Ha ha. To be fair, every time you hit reply, somebody dies within 3 seconds.

http://xkcd.com/552/

See the mouseover text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

The counter assumption, that correlation proves causation, is considered a questionable cause logical fallacy in that two events occurring together are taken to have a cause-and-effect relationship.

This fallacy is also known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc, Latin for "with this, therefore because of this", and "false cause".

A similar fallacy, that an event that follows another was necessarily a consequence of the first event, is sometimes described as post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for "after this, therefore because of this").

I think maybe you missed the parent comment?

And yet it's how we imply causation all the time.

In real life, were we can also draw from other experiences and make our "experiments" more targeted (as opposed to some scientific study involving obscure correlations), correlation is the best measure of causation.

So, while it might be the correct pedantic thing to say, in this correlation does very much imply causation. It's not like there are a lot of others, mysterious, factors at play here.

Besides blanket epistemological statements, how about we also do a little thinking on individual cases and how it applies to them?

Since we have so many fans of science on this site:

http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-impl...

So if you burn your hand on a stove element, do you keep your hand there until you've derived a theory of how the element might be burning it from first principles, all the while chanting your mantra?

Not at all. However, I also don't then post inflammatory pseudoscientific articles on the Internet with headlines like "White stove caused burns in man who was never burned by black stove." It's the current trend of bad science and lack of journalistic integrity that I'm taking issue with.

Wow... the implication that a white and black stove somehow mirror racism in anyway is laughable. It assumes that the only difference is color. It's disrespectful to the hundreds of years of institutional racism, denigration, and the current state of racial affairs in general.

No, that was your inference. The implication was that correlation does not equal causation.

Correlation is correlated with causation. Which makes it worth paying attention to.

If we're using strictly logic jargon, the statement "correlation does not imply causation" is true.

If we're using the normal English definition of "imply," then the statement is very often false.

The problem with this mantra is that it is technically true, but, as a negative, leaves out the rest of the world. For example, Correlation also does not imply non-correlation. This is vacuous, of course, but it illustrates the problem with using this kind of shorthand to quickly dismiss something rather than investigate it.

In truth, correlation does suggest causation, but not necessarily in the way one might expect. The WP article you linked goes into this.

All too often, this canard is trotted out to avoid thinking about where the causation might actually lay, rather than taking something seriously. It is precisely this that the shorthand is meant to prevent! Correlation does not imply causation, therefore you have to think carefully about the causation chain when considering two correlated events -- you can't just assume the causation isn't elsewhere, and you most definitely cannot assume it does not exist at all!

Yes, precisely! It is possible to prove causation, however, this submission does not do so. Please read this primer:

http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-impl...

Thanks for the link. I haven't heard this one yet in Internet forums. Now I can win arguments by throwing it around with abandon.

Look, I understand many of you are upset by this, however, there are ways to prove causation — it's just a lot more complicated than this.

Here's a primer:

http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-impl...

"Diversity information" should not be forwarded on to anyone except the statistician[1] in the personnel department who is creating charts to show that the company is making efforts to not exclude people.

It's probably time that companies started asking for a different form of resume / CV - without any age, gender, sexuality, race, religion, or disability information on it.

We could probably design a suitable experiment to satisfy everyone that the phenomena is real. I'd be interested to see what happens if 10 people send 3 CVs each for a company - same information but with "Mr Kim Johnson", "Mrs Kim Johnson", "Yolanda Johnson" swapped in for the name.

This is a very true and real problem, and there is significant data and other studies to support her assertion.

That said, the title is a little misleading as it's "Job Inquiries" that skyrocket, not offers. Of course it takes one to get the other....

"If you don’t believe that racism in the job market is real, then please read this article"

Stopped reading.

Yes, I believe racism, sexism, ageism, and a number of other isms in the job market are real. It's not a job market issue. It's a human being issue. As long as your resume has to get past a human then you're going to have all of those biases to contend with.

Human being issues get solved through discussion and examination. Including self-examination. By ragequitting after the first paragraph, you're cheating yourself.

However, this is a specifically a job market issue because as a society we have committed to making hiring reasonably fair.

Also, these biases are not immutable; they change over time. For example, there was a strong anti-Irish bias in the 19th century in the US and England. So I think your "humans are flawed so shut up about injustice" routine is neither correct nor helpful.

I want to see results of an experiment like this done in the UK for a standard call centre/restaurant/shop/etc. kind of job. All those places have Equal Opportunities Policies, which some say, means they will prioritise anybody over healthy, straight, white, British, non-religious males.

I want to know if it's true.

New resume generally attracts more attention than resume that was posted long time ago.

That could explain the difference.

employers should be allowed to discriminate however they wish. forced equality leads to more inequality. but i love the comments saying she should call the justice department because she didn't get a job because "she was black" when all she did was used two different names.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com