Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries http://www.archive.org/details/areemilygregmoreOObert B31 M415 M'Obr 7" P- Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology Department ofEconomics Working Paper Series Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination Marianne Bertrand Sendhil Mullainathan Working Paper 03-22 May 27, 2003 RoomE52-251 50 Memorial Drive MA Cambridge, 02142 This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network Paper Collection at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract id=422902 MASSACHUSETTSINSTITUTE OFTECHNOLOGY SEP 1 9 2003 LIBRARIES Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan * May 27, 2003 Abstract Weperformafield experimenttomeasureracialdiscrimination inthelabormarket. Werespondwith fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is randomly assigned either a very African American sounding name or averyWhite sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for AfricanAmericans, itelicitsafarsmallerincrease. Applicantslivinginbetterneighborhoodsreceivemore callbacks but, interestingly, this effect does not differ by race. The amount ofdiscrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list "Equal Opportunity Employer" in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little evidence that our results aredriven byemployers inferringsomethingotherthanrace, such associal class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature ofthe labor market. •UniversityofChicagoGraduateSchoolofBusiness, NBERandCEPR;MITandNBER. Addresses: 1101 E.58thStreet,R0 229D, Chicago, IL60637; 50Memorial Drive, E52-380a, Cambridge, MA 02142. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]. David Abrams, Victoria Bede,Simone Berkowitz, Hong Chung, AlmudenaFernandez, Mary Anne Guedigu- ian, Christine Jaw, Richa Maheswari, Beverley Martis, Alison Tisza, Grant Whitehorn, and Christine Yee provided excellent research assistance. Weare alsograteful to numerous colleaguesand seminar participants for very helpful comments. 1 Introduction Every measure of economic success reveals significant racial inequality in the US labor market. Compared to Whites, African Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed and earn nearly 25 percent less when they are employed (Council of Economic Advisers, 1998). This inequality has sparked a debate on whether employersdiscriminatebyrace. When facedwithobservablysimilarAfricanAmericanandWhite applicants, dothey favor the White one? Some argue yes, citing either employer prejudice or employer perception that race signals lower productivity. Others argue that discrimination is a relic ofthe past, eliminated by some combination of employer enlightenment, affirmative action programs and the profit-maximization motive. In fact, many in this later camp even feel that stringent enforcement of affirmative action programs has produced an environment ofreverse discrimination. They would argue that faced with identical candidates, employers might favortheAfrican American one.1 Datalimitations make it difficult to empiricallytestthese views. Since researchers possess far less data on workers than employers do, White and African American workers that appear similar to researchers may look very different to employers. So any racial difference in labor market outcomes could just as easily be attributed to these differences unobserved by researchers as to discrimination. We conduct a field experiment to circumvent this difficulty. We send resumes in response to help- wanted ads in Chicago and Boston newspapers and measure the number of callbacks each resume receives forinterviews. We experimentally manipulate perception ofrace viathe name on the resume. We randomly assign very White sounding names (such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker) to half the resumes and very African American sounding names (such as LakishaWashington or Jamal Jones) to the other half. Because we are also interested in how credentials affect discrimination, we experimentally vary the quality of the resumes used in responseto agiven ad. Higher quality applicants haveon average alittle more labor market experience and fewer holes in their employment history; they are also more likely to have an email address, havecompletedsomecertification degree, possess foreignlanguageskillsorhave been awardedsomehonors.2 In practice, we typically send four resumes in response to each ad: two higher quality and two lower quality ones. We randomly assign to one of the higher and one of the lower quality resumes an African American sounding name. In total, we respond to over 1300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical and customer servicesjob categories and send nearly 5000 resumes. The ads we respond to cover a large spectrum ofjob quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions. We find large racial differences in callback rates.3 Applicants with White names need to send about JThis campoften explainsthe poor performanceofAfrican Americansintermsofsupply factors. IfAfrican Americanslack many basic skills enteringthelabor market, then they will perform worse, even with parityor favoritism in hiring. In creatingthe higher quality resumes, we deliberately madesmall changes in credentialsso as to minimize the chance of over-qualification. 3Foreaseofexposition, werefertotheeffects uncovered in thisexperiment asracial differences. Technically, however, these 10 resumes to get one callback whereas applicants with African American names need to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. This 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant. Based on our estimates, aWhite name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years ofexperience. Since applicants' names are randomly assigned, this gap can only be attributed to the name manipulation. Race also affects the reward to having a better resume. Whites with higher quality resumes receive 30 percent more callbacks than Whites with lower quality resumes, astatistically significant difference. On the otherhand, having ahigher quality resumehas amuch smallereffect forAfrican Americans. In other words, the gap between White and African-Americans widens with resume quality. While one may have expected that improved credentials may alleviate employers' fear that African American applicants are deficient in some unobservable skills, this is not the case in our data.4 Discrimination therefore appears to bite twice, making it harder not only for African Americans to find ajob but also to improve their employability. The experiment also reveals several other aspects of discrimination. First, since we randomly assign applicants' postal addresses to the resumes, we can study the effect of neighborhood of residence on the probability of callback. We find that living in a wealthier (or more educated or more White) neighborhood increases callback rates. But, interestingly, African Americans are not helped more than Whites by living in a "better" neighborhood. Second, the amount ofdiscrimination we measure by industry does not appear correlated to Census-based measures of the racial gap by industry. The same is true for the amount of discrimination wemeasurein different occupations. Infact, wefind that discriminationlevelsarestatistically indistinguishable across all the occupation and industry categories covered in the experiment. We also find that federal contractors, who are thought to be more severely constrained by affirmative action laws, do not discriminate less; neither do larger employers or employers who explicitly state that they are an "Equal Opportunity Employer" in their ads. In Chicago, we find that employers located in more African American neighborhoods are slightly less likely to discriminate. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 compares this experiment to prior work on discrimination, and most notably to the labor market audit studies. We describe the experimental design in Section 3 and present the results in Section 4.1. In Section 5, we discuss possible interpretations of our results, focusing especially on two issues. First, we examine whether the race-specific names we have chosen might also proxy for social class above and beyond the race ofthe applicant. Using birth certificates data on mother's education for the different names used in our sample, we find little relationship between social background and the name specific callback rates.5 Second, we discuss how our results map back effects are about the racial soundingness ofnames. We briefly discuss the potential confounds between name and race below and moreextensively in Section 5.1. 4These results contrast with the view, mostly based on non-experimental evidence, that African Americans receive higher returnstoskills. For example, estimatingearnings regressions on several decades ofCensus data, Heckman et al. (2001) show that African Americansexperience higher returnsto a high school degree than Whites. 5Wealso argue that asocial classinterpretation would find it hardtoexplain all ofourresults, such aswhy living a better neighborhood does not increasecallback rates morefor African American names than for White names.