In Simple Words
Think of an exclusive private club membership committee that automatically approves candidates with legacy family names from founding local families, while placing applicants with any non-traditional regional last names—even if raised in the same neighborhood—into a secondary review line. The bias is not based on where the applicant was raised, but on a strict preference for the dominant historical majority name group.
Applications to Canadian job postings
- English name, Canadian credentials
- Group used for comparison
- Greek name, Canadian credentials
- Callbacks 4.0 percentage points lower
Randomized names on resumes with Canadian education and experience. A name effect does not directly measure race, birthplace or actual language ability.
See source →Research question
Hiring discrimination is often assumed to be driven primarily by racial visibility or assumed recent foreign origin. However, applicants with non-Anglo European surnames who possess native host-country education and experience face callback penalties identical to visible non-white minority groups, demonstrating an underlying employer premium for traditional Anglo-Saxon names rather than solely a racial or foreign origin discount.
Participants
N = 366 resumes with Greek names (Lukas Minsopoulos, Nicole Minsopoulos) submitted alongside English-Canadian control resumes to job postings in Toronto and Montreal.
Study Design
Randomized correspondence experiment testing Greek-named resumes with Canadian education and experience against identical English-named control resumes (Type 0).
Results
Resumes with Greek names experienced a statistically significant 4.0 percentage point reduction in interview callbacks (11.8% callback rate vs. 15.8% for English-named resumes), generating a penalty virtually identical to the 4.4 percentage point penalty experienced by Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani applicants.
Takeaway
Equal opportunity enforcement agencies should expand hiring discrimination audits beyond visible racial minorities to include white ethnic minority groups with non-Anglo surnames.
Source and citation
See source →Read alongside the research
Plain-English glossary
Original explanations, informed by the references below. Examples are illustrations, not data from the studies above. The research text stays unchanged.
- Percentage points
The difference between two percentages.
ExampleA rise from 40% to 50% is 10 percentage points. Relative to the starting value, that is a 25% increase.
Office for National Statistics · Percentages ↗Read more about percentage points →- Statistically significant
A label used when a result passes a chosen statistical threshold, often p < 0.05. It does not show how large or useful an effect is. A result that is not statistically significant does not prove there is no effect.
ExampleA study reports p = 0.03 against a 0.05 threshold. It passes that test, but the effect could still be too small to matter.
American Statistical Association · Statement on p-values ↗Read more about statistically significant →