Anglo First-Name Signaling Inefficiency
RCTReview
Minority job applicants who adopt host-country English first names while retaining foreign surnames fail to generate significantly higher job interview callback rates compared to applicants retaining full foreign names.
Picture this
Think of painting only the front door of a house a local traditional color while keeping the rest of the building in its original foreign architectural style. Passersby still classify the house as foreign because the underlying structure and remaining features remain unchanged.
What the evidence says
Applicants with English first names and Chinese last names received a 12.5% callback rate, which was significantly lower than applicants with full English names (15.7%, p < 0.05) and not statistically different from applicants with full Chinese names (11.3%).
- Who was studied
- N = 12,910 resumes submitted to 3,225 job postings across 20 occupation categories in Toronto and Montreal, Canada.
- How
- Randomized field experiment / resume audit comparing callback rates for resumes with English first names and Chinese last names (e.g., Allen Wang) against resumes with full English names and full Chinese names.
What to do
Discontinue reliance on partial name-anglicization as a individual strategy for overcoming hiring discrimination and adopt structural resume-anonymization policies.
From the source
"The callback rate among Type 1 resumes with English first names and Chinese last names... is 12.5 percent, which is significantly different from the callback rate among those with first and last English names... but not significantly different from the callback rate among those with first and last Chinese names."
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