<p>This aint it
[Table</a> A-2. Employment status of the civilian population by race, sex, and age](<a href=“http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm]Table”>http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm)</p>
<p>by the way, no one else is incredulous at Yolanda Spivey’s claim that a 22 yo recent grad with no experience who applies for a clerical position gets offered a 6 figure executive position because the Caucasian HR person liked her?</p>
<p>Yes! Absolutely! My DDs name does not match her low income/first generation/ URM status at all…it was done by design. I am old fashioned and believe in old fashioned/ mainstream names. Makes it easier on the kids down the road.</p>
<p>Perhaps when a baby is born, his or her parents’ first thought about his or her name is not about employment prospects 21+ years in the future.</p>
<p>@ Oldmom,it was for me. Lol. And I’m sure many other blacks think WAY into the future as well. I think the ones that don’t are being impulsive and not thinking about what’s best for the child in some ways. I wanted both children to be free of discrimnation before they showed up for the interview. Names are our calling card in so many ways. And it’s unfair. But who am I to change societal norms?</p>
<p>oldmom, I can assure you that when our kids were born we thought very carefully about how their names would affect their future lives - not just employment, but in lots of ways. There are few (no?) names you can give a kid that will help them significantly, but lots of names that could cause them problems. Heck, just calling a kid by his or her middle name (e.g. H. Ross Perot) is problematic. It may not be the first thing you think about, but it probably should be the last one. I get the impression that some parents feel that expressing their personal creativity is the only thing they care about. Why wouldn’t you take a minute to consider whether your self-expression is going to cause your kid real life problems?</p>
<p>Aside - I had an Asian friend and business partner years ago whose parents named him and his siblings with very traditional, stereotypical “white bread” first names. The funny thing was, his Mom couldn’t pronounce any of them.</p>
<p>My friends mother, who is 80 now, picked all her children’s names (she’s black) with the idea that if they were professionals of any kind, it would look nice on a card. They all didn’t become white collar, but many have name cards and laugh how it was planned early on.
She cringed when a neighbor, Mrs. Cane, named her daughter Candy, figured she set her up for a life of jokes and not being taken seriously. I’ve heard worse, but I did see her point. : )</p>
<p>I have a friend who was a high school principal, she is GWU & Columbia educated, with a Phd…
She realized the discrimination that would occur if her students used their full names…</p>
<p>She would always encourage her students to use their first initial, then middle name and last name on their high school resumes. So Shodeneisha Angela Smith would read S.Angela Smith on the resume. </p>
<p>So glad that I had enough forethought to give dd14 a name where she would blend in and not have adcoms or prospective employers giggling as they passed her resume around.</p>
<p>Did people in my neighborhood laugh? Or old high school acquaintances turn their noses up when I announced her name when we encountered them in the grocery store? absolutely!!!</p>
<p>But I didn’t care, I knew her name was her brand so to speak.</p>
<p>And those parents who didn’t consider future employability? Should their children be branded throughout their lives?</p>
<p>Chinese-Americans typically give their kids “American” names on paper but they almost always have a Chinese name at home. The families don’t even think of this name as Roman letters–it is represented with a Chinese character.</p>
<p>Exactly, but they know that when that Asian child goes off into the world, he must blend in! But at home, he can be conform to those norms.</p>
<p>I know an Alize and a woman who named her daughter Henessy…really? Is that fair to the kids?</p>
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<p>Liked her? No. Wanted to sleep with her? Quite possibly.</p>
<p>I’ve known it to happen. I interviewed a girl who met a guy on the street who was hiring for one of the earliest internet providers. She was with a professor who knew the guy. They had drinks, he interviewed her, and he offered her a job for something like $60K+. (This was circa 1986.) She told me all about it because she couldn’t believe it was legit. She was a nice girl, she was intelligent, she had just graduated from a good school, but she had NO experience. I was interviewing her for a starting job, reporting to me. Ironically, I had seen the job she was offered advertised in the NYT and had applied for it–didn’t get a nibble. And believe me, I was a lot more qualified than she was. Sure, he wasn’t doing a side-by-side comparison of our looks: he never saw me. But the fact that she was very attractive and very young clearly had a lot to do with his offer.</p>
<p>Regarding names, I think that many potential employers would be put off–even if not consciously–by names that make the person sound unprofessional. No matter what the implied race or ethnicity. Think the proverbial “stripper names.” I think that having a fairly conformist name is kind of like showing up at an interview wearing a suit: it signals–fairly or not–that you know how to handle the expectations of a corporate environment, even if you never wear it again. Or at least it doesn’t set off alarm bells that say you may NOT. (Of course, there are areas of employment where being called Bubba or Bambi would be a plus.)</p>
<p>I would never deny, though, that in some cases racism or ethnic prejudice definitely come into play.</p>
<p>I dated a girl named Cinnamon. Not a stripper, but she could have been. Shoe store manager. I figured she was gaming me so I checked her license - nope, that was really her given name.</p>
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What? I know two Yolandas. The first one went to grade school with me and she came from an Italian family. The other is a woman I worked with several years ago, neither Hispanic nor African-American.</p>
<p>Did anyone read the article? Not only did she change the name, but Monster.com had a racial checkoff. Yolanda is checked off as black; Bianca as white.</p>
<p>So you can debate the name all you want–the black version of White got way less calls than the White version, with the same resume. I think that speaks for itself.</p>
<p>There is an interesting comment on the article from someone who says that they are a recruiter who uses Monster and Monster Diversity. She says that if you buy access to Monster Diversity it give you an additional screen that includes-in “diverse” candidates. It doesnt disqualify minority candidates and it doesnt display what the demographics of the candidates are to the searcher. </p>
<p>So assuming the commentor is correct- NO employer saw the race data. </p>
<p>So Yolanda’s advice of skipping the survey based on her “experiment” could be harmful to her readers. </p>
<p>Another gigantic flaw
“But the real problem with this story is that a crucial search criteria employers use which would have affected Yolanda’s ranking in search results is the date of last resume update. The default search option is “resumes uploaded/updated in the last 30 days” and employers can reduce that number to a week or a <em>day</em> if they want to. If Yolanda’s resume had not been updated in several days or weeks and Bianca’s was brand new, Bianca would be ranked higher in the search results. Depending on how many resumes a search returns (50 candidates who meet criteria vs 2,000 or more–a realistic number for some skillsets), a recruiter just won’t get to older resumes.”</p>
<p>It would be nice if Monster addresses the hysteria.</p>
<p>It has been years since I read Freakonomics but there was a chapter on this. Certain names on the resume resulted in a smaller chance of landing an interview.</p>
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<p>I have found this to be less of a case with Chinese-Americans of Gen Y/Millenials than was the case with Gen X or earlier. </p>
<p>Factors include a general movement away from completely assimilating and thus, forgetting all the culture of one’s home origins, greater confidence in asserting one’s pride in one’s cultural identity, an influx of Chinese immigrants who aren’t inclined to use American names, etc.</p>
<p>I have an unusual name, and I remember being surprised when a work colleague (who I had only conversed with over the phone for 10 years) told another colleague he thought I was black (I’m not - I’m white – or more of a pinky beige). It must have been my unusual name.</p>
<p>Which also elicits the response “are you Sephardic? A Sephardic Jew?”</p>
<p>I’m not that either. I try to respond with the right mixture of regret/let down for the asker, who seems to be wanting a connection of some kind, and an apology for being so confusing.</p>
<p>As a woman, I think we experience discrimination, or those of us who came of age in the '80s did, but it’s nothing like the discrimination experienced by people of color.</p>
<p>by the way, no one else is incredulous at Yolanda Spivey’s claim that a 22 yo recent grad with no experience who applies for a clerical position gets offered a 6 figure executive position because the Caucasian HR person liked her? </p>
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<p>I think it’s a crock, myself. When I think about the difficulty I had in landing a job that paid barely a third of that, and I have a “white” name … and experience … I find it hard to believe. But that’s just me.</p>
<p>Where do I sign up for one of those jobs?!</p>
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<p>Is your name Dennis Rodman?</p>