Armed Liberal

So I scanned the research study on hiring today.

Personally, I’d have designed it slightly differently, to track two other dimensions: the effect of names that are obviously ethnic but non-African American (Juan, Ashish, Yuri, Isao and Wei come to mind immediately) as well as names that are fairly obviously white but ‘non-traditional’ (Rainbow, Sunshine, Redwood).

The fact that the investigators were only looking along the white-African American axis and ignored these other effects leaves their study subject to criticism (which it seems to be receiving in bulk … I almost said ‘in spades’, then decided to save myself the hate mail.).

First I should qualify my comments by the fact that I have a hard time with most social science ‘research’. Coming from a physical sciences background, I find that many, if not most of the research I’ve seen in the social sciences is just bad science, which simply sets out to document the prejudices of the researcher (Bellesiles, anyone?). So I have a knee-jerk reaction … call it a prejudice … when I first read about studies like this.

I tend to see them as interesting anecdotes, and in some ways find it frustrating that pseudo-quantitative research gets standing above meaningful personal anecdote.

Having stood on a chair and ranted for a bit, I’ll also defend the study as a useful anecdote.

I’ll defend it from two points of view.

The first is my own, as someone who has from time to time been involved in ‘mass market’ hiring and has seen for himself that certain resumes are shoved to the side for reasons that have little or nothing to do with their content.

The second is that we have to look on the study as reflecting what really happens when we take a pool of African American applicants…LaToyas and Muhammeds…real people…and try and understand what they see in the world.

And the reality is that for a million reasons, they face barriers that others don’t.

Some of the barriers are self-imposed.

But some of them aren’t.

And whether those barriers mean it’s 50% harder to get an interview or 5% , that’s just damn wrong.