You may be one of many people in Florida looking for a new job. Sadly, racial discrimination is still going on at this point in the market. Some people are not even considered in the earliest stages of the employment application process.
Research studies show that racial discrimination still occurs in the hiring process
The National Bureau of Economic Research performed a study and found that racial discrimination is still happening in the job application process. The team of researchers put that to the test and sent out over 80,000 fake job applications. They discovered that if a job application included a name that sounded Black, it was around 10% less likely to be contacted about the position compared with those that included white-sounding names.
The companies the researchers applied to were Fortune 500s. It was found that racial discrimination was associated with a small number of those companies. In total, there were 108 companies included in the study.
Which sectors are experiencing discrimination?
According to one of the study’s co-authors, certain sectors are experiencing more discrimination than others. While 10% of the distinctly Black names used in the fake profiles experienced racial discrimination and were passed over in favor of white-sounding names, some companies favored male names over females. Others even had a preference to call back female names. This shows that gender discrimination is also a problem.
The study determined that around 20% of all the companies the researchers applied to with fake profiles regularly engage in systemic racial discrimination in spite of it being against the law.
Companies that are in the retail and food services sectors have more discrimination, according to the study. Those that are less likely to discriminate based on race are the health, engineering, and accommodation fields. What the researchers learned is that a company’s identity was largely to blame for whether it practiced racial discrimination in the job application and hiring processes.
