Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

In a now-classic study of discrimination in the U.S. labor market, economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan set out to document the impact of race on the job application process. They constructed fictitious résumés that matched qualifications of actual help-wanted ads listed in newspapers in Chicago and Boston. They signaled the race of applicants on identical résumés by using names that sounded either black or white and sent five thousand of them to thirteen hundred posted jobs. When they tallied the responses, they found that Tyrone, Jamal, Keisha, and Tamika got far fewer calls for interviews than Geoffrey, Brad, Emily, and Jill, even though their credentials and experience were exactly the same. The applicants with black-sounding names were 50 percent less likely to get a callback than applicants with white-sounding names.