Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
American Economic Association
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on
Labor Market Discrimination
Author(s): Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan
Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Sep., 2004), pp XXXXXXXXXX
Published by: American Economic Association
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Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and
Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
By MARIANNE BERTRAND AND SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN*
We study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads
in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perceived race, resumes are
randomly assigned African-American- or White-sounding names. White names
receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. Callbacks are also more respon-
sive to resume quality for White names than for African-American ones. The racial
gap is uniform across occupation, industry, and employer size. We also find little
evidence that employers are infe
ing social class from the names. Differential
treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the U.S. labor market. (JEL
J71, J64).
Every measure of economic success reveals
significant racial inequality in the U.S. labo
market. Compared to Whites, African-Ameri-
cans are twice as likely to be unemployed and
earn nearly 25 percent less when they are em-
ployed (Council of Economic Advisers, 1998).
This inequality has sparked a debate as to
whether employers treat members of different
races differentially. When faced with observ-
ably similar African-American and White ap-
plicants, do they favor the White one? Some
argue yes, citing either employer prejudice o
employer perception that race signals lower pro-
ductivity. Others argue that differential treat-
ment by race is a relic of the past, eliminated by
some combination of employer enlightenment,
affirmative action programs and the profit-
maximization motive. In fact, many in this latte
camp even feel that stringent enforcement of
affirmative action programs has produced an
environment of reverse discrimination. They
would argue that faced with identical candi-
* Bertrand: Graduate School of Business, University of
Chicago, 1101 E. 58th Street, RO 229D, Chicago, IL 60637,
NBER, and CEPR (e-mail: marianne.bertrand@gsb.
uchicago.edu); Mullainathan: Department of Economics,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 50 Memorial Drive,
E52-380a, Cam
idge, MA 02142, and NBER (e-mail:
XXXXXXXXXX). David A
ams, Victoria Bede, Simone
Berkowitz, Hong Chung, Almudena Fernandez, Mary Anne
Guediguian, Christine Jaw, Richa Maheswari, Beverley
Martis, Alison Tisza, Grant Whitehorn, and Christine Yee
provided excellent research assistance. We are also grateful
to numerous colleagues and seminar participants for very
helpful comments.
dates, employers might favor the African-
American one.' Data limitations make it
difficult to empirically test these views. Since
researchers possess far less data than employers
do, White and African-American workers that
appear similar to researchers may look very
different to employers. So any racial difference
in labor market outcomes could just as easily be
attributed to differences that are observable to
employers but unobservable to researchers.
To circumvent this difficulty, we conduct a
field experiment that builds on the co
espon-
dence testing methodology that has been pri-
marily used in the past to stud' minority
outcomes in the United Kingdom. We send
resumes in response to help-wanted ads in Chi-
cago and Boston newspapers and measure call-
back for interview for each sent resume. We
This camp often explains the poor performance of
African-Americans in terms of supply factors. If African-
Americans lack many basic skills entering the labor market,
then they will perform worse, even with parity or favoritism
in hiring.
2 See Roger Jowell and Patricia Prescott-Clarke (1970),
Jim Hu
uck and Simon Carter (1980), Colin Brown and
Pat Gay (1985), and Peter A. Riach and Judith Rich (1991).
One caveat is that some of these studies fail to fully match
skills between minority and nonminority resumes. For ex-
ample some impose differential education background by
racial origin. Doris Weichselbaumer (2003, 2004) studies
the impact of sex-stereotypes and sexual orientation. Rich-
ard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen XXXXXXXXXXperform a related field
experiment to study how employers' response to a criminal
past varies between the North and the South in the United
States.
991
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THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
experimentally manipulate perception of race
via the name of the fictitious job applicant. We
randomly assign very White-sounding names
(such as Emily Walsh or Greg Baker) to half the
resumes and very African-American-sounding
names (such as Lakisha Washington or Jamal
Jones) to the other half. Because we are also
interested in how credentials affect the racial
gap in callback, we experimentally vary the
quality of the resumes used in response to a
given ad. Higher-quality applicants have on av-
erage a little more labor market experience and
fewer holes in their employment history; they
are also more likely to have an e-mail address,
have completed some certification degree, pos-
sess foreign language skills, or have been
awarded some honors.3 In practice, we typically
send four resumes in response to each ad: two
higher-quality and two lower-quality ones.
We randomly assign to one of the higher- and
one of the lower-quality resumes an African-
American-sounding name. In total, we respond
to over 1,300 employment ads in the sales,
administrative support, clerical, and custome
services job categories and send nearly 5,000
resumes. The ads we respond to cover a large
spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at
retail establishments and clerical work in a mail
room, to office and sales management positions.
We find large racial differences in callback
rates.4 Applicants with White names need to
send about 10 resumes to get one callback
whereas applicants with African-American
names need to send about 15 resumes. This
50-percent gap in callback is statistically signif-
icant. A White name yields as many more call-
backs as an additional eight years of experience
on a resume. Since applicants' names are ran-
domly assigned, this gap can only be attributed
to the name manipulation.
Race also affects the reward to having a bet-
ter resume. Whites with higher-quality resumes
receive nearly 30-percent more callbacks than
3 In creating the higher-quality resumes, we deliberately
make small changes in credentials so as to minimize the risk
of overqualification.
4 For ease of exposition, we refer to the effects uncov-
ered in this experiment as racial differences. Technically,
however, these effects are about the racial soundingness of
names. We
iefly discuss below the potential confounds
between name and race. A more extensive discussion is
offered in Section IV, subsection B.
Whites with lower-quality resumes. On the
other hand, having a higher-quality resume has
a smaller effect for African-Americans. In othe
words, the gap between Whites and African-
Americans widens with resume quality. While
one may have expected improved credentials to
alleviate employers' fear that African-American
applicants are deficient in some unobservable
skills, this is not the case in our data.5
The experiment also reveals several othe
aspects of the differential treatment by race.
First, since we randomly assign applicants'
postal addresses to the resumes, we can study
the effect of neighborhood of residence on the
likelihood of callback. We find that living in a
wealthier (or more educated or Whiter) neigh-
borhood increases callback rates. But, interest-
ingly, African-Americans are not helped more
than Whites by living in a "better" neighbor-
hood. Second, the racial gap we measure in
different industries does not appear co
elated to
Census-based measures of the racial gap in
wages. The same is true for the racial gap we
measure in different occupations. In fact, we
find that the racial gaps in callback are statisti-
cally indistinguishable across all the occupation
and industry categories covered in the experi-
ment. Federal contractors, who are thought to be
more severely constrained by affirmative action
laws, do not treat the African-American re-
sumes more preferentially; neither do larger em-
ployers or employers who explicitly state that
they are "Equal Opportunity Employers." In
Chicago, we find a slightly smaller racial gap
when employers are located in more African-
American neighborhoods.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
Section I compares this experiment to earlie
work on racial discrimination, and most nota-
bly to the labor market audit studies. We
describe the experimental design in Section
II and present the results in Section III, subsec-
tion A. In Section IV, we discuss possible in-
terpretations of our results, focusing especially
on two issues. First, we examine whether the
5 These results contrast with the view, mostly based on
nonexperimental evidence, that African-Americans receive
higher returns to skills. For example, estimating earnings
regressions on several decades of Census data, James
J. Heckman et al XXXXXXXXXXshow that African-Americans
experience higher returns to a high school degree than
Whites do.
SEPTEMBER XXXXXXXXXX
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BERTRAND AND MULLAINATHAN: RACE IN THE