Now here’s an interesting bit of news. Remember how you get to pick on the kid with the funny name back in grammar school? (Or perhaps you were the kid with the funny name and got picked on.) Turns out that it can also have the same effect on employers.
Now that’s tough. While discrimination (especially with such a mundane ) is basically illegal, there’s no stopping people from being subliminally affected by names. If you ever thought that if a black guy named “Barack Obama” can be elected president of the free world, then you can get employed with no problems, think again.
[R]ésumés with white-sounding names have a 50% greater chance of receiving a callback when compared to those with African American names, according to a study performed for the National Bureau of Economic Research by the University of Chicago’s Marianne Bertrand and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sendhil Mullaina.
The situation’s bad enough that those with ethnic sounding names are asked about their immigration status even if they’re US natives. Some who are namesakes with celebrities are subjected to jokes that completely change the tone of interviews.
Source: CNN
