May 17th is the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the case in which the Supreme Court struck down laws allowing and even requiring racial segregation. Have five decades of progress finally wiped out discrimination?
Or, have we at least reduced discrimination to a minor issue? Or have we gone so far over the top that now it's whites who are discriminated against in the job market?
It turns out that it's hard to get a good scientific answer to these questions. Black and white Americans are different in many ways. Blacks have lower incomes than whites, but they also have less education, live in different neighborhoods, etc.
It's very hard to sort out differences due to racial discrimination from the effects of other characteristics that determine what a person earns.
A couple of very clever economists, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan of M.I.T., have combined pop culture and high tech statistics to test for discrimination in a way that really works. We can all do the pop culture part together.
You're trying to hire someone and you get four resumes in the mail. First names on the resumes are Emily, Greg, Lakisha and Jamal. What do you think?
Unless you've been living on the moon, you think that Lakisha and Jamal are probably black and that Emily and Greg are probably white. The next question: Did anything go through your mind about whom you'd prefer to work with? If it did, then you're racially prejudiced. Notice I didn't say that your prejudice is unfounded and I didn't say which way it goes, I just said you're prejudging based on race.
Most of us have prejudices but we've also learned not to act based on our off-the-cuff reactions. What the Chicago/M.I.T. duo wanted to know was whether companies do act on racial prejudice when they hire. The team set up a controlled experiment. The research assistants on the team answered help wanted ads with resumes with either black names or white names and counted up which got better responses.
Doing this carefully wasn't so easy. First the researchers downloaded real resumes that had been posted on the Web, changing a few details to protect privacy. Next the team combed through birth records to find 18 first names that were distinctively black (Latonya and Tamika topped the list for girls, as did Tyrone and Tremayne for boys) or distinctively white (top examples were Anne, Kristen, Neil and Todd). Research assistants flipped a coin to assign a black or white name to a resume and mailed out an application.
Because names were assigned to resumes randomly, on average, applications with white names attached and black names attached were equally good. If blacks and whites are treated equally, then each pile of applications should have gotten about the number of responses.
The team mailed out mailed out 5,000 applications. Results? "White" applicants got 50 percent more callbacks than did "black" applicants. That's a big difference. One way to interpret the 50 percent gap is that if you're black and looking for work, you need an extra eight years of job experience to have the same chance at a callback as a white job-seeker.
Does making oneself a better candidate protect one from discrimination? The Bertrand/Mullainathan team looked into this too. They divided the resumes they sent out into high and low quality piles based on the amount of job experience and the number of employment gaps on the resume. Having a higher quality resume increased the chances of getting a callback by 30 percent when a white name was attached, but only by 9 percent when a black name was attached. If anything, the better candidates suffered greater discrimination in terms of the chance of getting a callback.
This unusual controlled experiment proves two things: Employers do act on their prejudices about race, and on average the prejudices hurt African-Americans.
When the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, discrimination was the rule. Today's it's the exception. The earnings of black men with full-time jobs has risen from 60 cents on the dollar when compared to white men, to about 80 cents on the dollar. And today sometimes job discrimination favor black applicants.
But on average it's still black Americans who get the short end of the stick.
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Dick Startz is Castor Professor of Economics and Davis Distinguished Scholar at the University of Washington. He can be reached at econcol@u.washington.edu.
This column appeared in the following publications:
Bellingham Herald -- April 12, 2004
Walla Walla Union Bulletin -- May 14, 2004