Racial disparities among call-backs for job applications

Studies that shows that black sounding names are less likely to get call backs from employers than resumes from white sounding names.

 * The most common study on this, Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal” supposedly found that resumes from blacks sounding names are less likely to get call backs from employers than resumes from white sounding names.
 * Limitations include the fact that this study assumes all black sounding names are equal. Black Harvard economist, Roland Fryer concludes that after taking into account the socioeconomic correlates of distinctively African-American sounding names, the large effect of these names on employer responses attenuates. Distinctly African American–sounding first names are associated with relatively low socio-economic status among African Americans, and may confound employers’ perceptions of race and socio-economic status. When examining data regarding perceptions of race from names. The data suggest that if names did play a role, it's because of factors other than race. Names given by highly educated black mothers like Jalen and Nia are less likely to be perceived as having a low SES compared to Lakisha and Jamal.
 * This study only on newspaper ads
 * This study does not replicate

Studies that factor for SES status of names by race


 * Darolia et al 2015 sent nearly 9000 fictitious resumes to advertisements for job openings in seven major cities in the United States across six occupational categories. We randomly assigned names to the resumes that convey race and gender but for which a strong socio-economic connotation is not implicated. This study find little evidence of systematic employer preferences for applicants from particular race and gender groups.
 * Deming et al 2016 published a paper in the most recent issue of AER. It also reports an audit study in which resumes were sent to recruiters. While its goal was to estimate the impact of for-profit degrees, they did also manipulate race of job applicants via names.

Unfortunately a large body of social science evidence on racial discrimination operates under a misguided assumption that all black names are alike; the findings from correspondence audits are likely sensitive to name selections in which employers would have made assumptions about education and income rather than race itself.

Replication

The Bertrand study sent less than 5,000 resumes to only four occupational categories in two cities. An Updated Analysis of Race and Gender Effects on Employer Interest in Job Applicants (2016) almost doubles the sample size, increases the cities being tested on, increases occupational categories from four to six, and increases the racial groups being tested from two to three. To control for discrepancies of SES perceptions in different black, white, and hispanic names, they based their names on common racial names from the United States Census. There was no significant evidence found of employer discrimination between Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks or between Male and Female applicants.

If one actually takes SES perceptions and other factors in account when comparing names- the disparities immediately vanish

I also suggest reading this article as it goes through the first study as a bonus.