Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers

Abstract

We study the results of a massive nationwide correspondence experiment sending more than 83,000 fictitious applications with randomized characteristics to geographically dispersed jobs posted by 108 of the largest U.S. employers. Distinctively Black names reduce the probability of employer contact by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively white names. The magnitude of this racial gap in contact rates differs substantially across firms, exhibiting a between-company standard deviation of 1.9 percentage points. Despite an insignificant average gap in contact rates between male and female applicants, we find a between-company standard deviation in gender contact gaps of 2.7 percentage points, revealing that some firms favor male applicants and others favor women. Company-specific racial contact gaps are temporally and spatially persistent, and negatively correlated with firm profitability, federal contractor status, and a measure of recruiting centralization. Discrimination exhibits little geographical dispersion, but two-digit industry explains roughly half of the cross-firm variation in both racial and gender contact gaps. Contact gaps are highly concentrated in particular companies, with firms in the top quintile of racial discrimination responsible for nearly half of lost contacts to Black applicants in the experiment. Controlling false discovery rates to the 5% level, 23 companies are found to discriminate against Black applicants. Our findings establish that discrimination against distinctively Black names is concentrated among a select set of large employers, many of which can be identified with high confidence using large-scale inference methods.

Attributions to discrimination in multiracial contexts: Isolating the effect of target group membership.

“…The percentage of the population that identifies as Asian, Latino, and Black American have all increased substantially in recent decades (e.g., Jones et al, 2021). Moreover, Asian, Latino, and Black Americans all face higher levels of discrimination relative to White Americans across a variety of domains including hiring, which was the focus of the present investigation (e.g., Kline et al, 2022; R. T. Lee et al, 2019, Lippens et al, 2023; Quillian et al, 2017, 2020).…”

What does your name mean to you?

“…2 Name-based microaggressions are not restricted to K-12 experiences, however. They have been found to influence mental health service provision, 3 job interview call-backs, [4][5][6] and physician wellness. 7 A 2020 report by the Migration Policy Institute found that 17% of all health care workers are foreign born-comprising 29% of physicians, 16% of nurses, and 22% of nursing assistants.…”

Discrimination Against Migrants and its Determinants: Evidence from a Multi-Purpose Field Experiment in the Housing Rental Market

“…Recent research on hiring discrimination in several countries, includes Canada (Oreopoulos (2011)), China (Maurer-Fazio (2012)), and Mexico (Arceo-Gomez and Campos-Vazquez (2014)). Discrimination attributes studied include age (David, Ian and Button (2019), Burn et al (2022)), unemployment spells (Kroft, Lange and Notowidigdo (2013)), gender (Haoran He and Han (2023)), and race Kline, Rose and Walters (2022).…”