The Fiction of Affirmative Action

..our biases are mostly unconscious, and they can run surprisingly deep. Consider race. For a 2004 study called “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?,” the economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand put white-sounding names (Emily Walsh, Greg Baker) or black-sounding names (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones) on similar fictitious résumés, which they then sent out to a variety of companies in Boston and Chicago. To get the same number of callbacks, they learned, they needed to either send out half again as many résumés with black names as those with white names, or add eight extra years of relevant work experience to the résumés with black names.

I talked with Mullainathan about the study. All of the hiring managers he and Bertrand had consulted while designing it, he said, told him confidently that Lakisha and Jamal would get called back more than Emily and Greg. Affirmative action guaranteed it, they said: recruiters were bending over backwards in their search for good black candidates. Despite making conscious efforts to find such candidates, however, these recruiters turned out to be excluding them unconsciously at every turn. After the study came out, a man named Jamal sent a thank-you note to Mullainathan, saying that he’d started using only his first initial on his résumé and was getting more interviews.

–The Atlantic, emphasis mine.

Editors Note: the “depth” of such bias is only surprising to those who aren’t paying attention.