“IF YOU’VE got
the grades, the skills and the determination, this government will ensure you can
succeed,” trumpeted David Cameron, the British prime minister, on October 26th,
as he unveiled plans to tackle discrimination in the workplace.
Ten big employers in the public and private
sectors—including the civil service, HSBC and Deloitte—will start recruiting on
a “name-blind” basis in Britain. In such schemes, those drawing up shortlists
of applicants cannot see their names, with the aim of reducing racial and
sexual bias. But do they work?
Several countries
have experimented with name-blind applications. In 2010 Germany’s Anti-Discrimination
Agency sponsored a voluntary scheme to get businesses to try it. In France a
law passed in 2006 made the anonymising of applicants’ résumé’s compulsory for
firms of over 50 employees. But the government was slow in laying down the
conditions for how the law would operate, and only started enforcing it last
year. In Sweden and the Netherlands there have been some trials.
Discrimination
against job applicants based on their names is well documented, particularly
among ethnic minorities. An experiment in Germany found that candidates with
German-sounding names were 14% more likely to be called for an interview than
candidates with Turkish ones. A review of various studies, by the Institute for
the Study of Labor (IZA), a German outfit, found that anonymised job
applications boost the chances of ethnic-minority candidates being invited to
an interview. A Swedish study found that it led to more ethnic-minority people
being hired.
Ensuring that a
candidate is completely anonymous is also tricky. A 2012 French study found that
foreign-born candidates and those from poor districts were less likely to be
called for interview when applications were anonymised. Its authors suggested
that recruiters may have used other indicators, such as knowledge of Arabic, to
identify race. In places with religious tension, such as Northern Ireland, the
name of a school can reveal a candidate’s faith, while a few years missing on a
CV may suggest maternity leave, and thus that the candidate is female.
Going name-blind
when shortlisting candidates may be a sensible start, but it is likely to be
just a small step towards ending hiring bias.
