This is an important follow-up study to what’s been commonly-reproduced research: race and sex make a statically significant difference in who’s called back for job interviews. And now we have decent evidence that it’s a fraction of hiring managers who’re responsible for the racial disparity. But just like how most men may not be serious sexual harassers, or the overwhelming majority of people in a “bad” neighborhood may not commit crimes, it only takes a few percent of a given group behaving awfully to another in order to cause widespread mistrust and harm.
Kevin Drum, writing in Mother Jones:
A popular way of testing for racist attitudes in employment is to send multiple applications to a single job posting. The applications are generally identical except for one thing: the names of the applicants. One has a sterotypically white name (Madison Nash) and the other has a stereotypically black name (LaShonda Greene). Then you check to see how many of the white names get callbacks for interviews compared to the black names. Generally speaking, the white names get called back at a rate 2-4 percentage points higher than the black names.
…Only a small group, about one-sixth of the total, discriminates against blacks, but that sixth is massively racist: they all but flatly refuse to even interview someone who seems like they might be black.
…All by themselves, their racism is so overwhelming that it’s enough to make a noticeable difference in the overall rate.