Discriminating By Name

The Digerati Life recently ran a fascinating article on name discrimination, and how the name you choose for your child could affect their prospects in job and housing markets. On the one hand, name seems a terribly shallow, arbitrary and completely unfair way to judge people. On the other, racism aside, I can see how name may affect hiring decisions.

The popularity of different names vary over time and according to socioeconomic status (say, Britneys born around y2k or Marilyns in the 50s) so at the very least a name says something about the group of people with that name, and may hint at ones parents values. Suppose an employer receives 100 equally qualified resumes, has time to interview ten people, preferring a female for the job. Customers generally like and like being around attractive people, so all else being equal the employer is imagining an attractive, poised, professional-looking person with a musical voice and an air of efficiency. Not imagining an overweight person with coarse accent, grating voice, ugly shoes and tent-like floral print dress.

Cut to Google facial recognition search for: Dolores, Bertha, Regina and Jessica, Kayleigh, Summer. A Rose by any other name would probably be fuglier, which surprised me.

A name doesn't say anything conclusive about an individual but the employer does not have time to throughly evaluate all the applicants and is forced to gamble with interview time, so stereotypes and generalizations may be used to estimate odds.

Even more interesting, research shows that names affect people's view of themselves as reflected by other peoples expectations of them. Teachers, for instance, could not help forming impressions of students before meeting them based solely on their name.

Link: Name Discrimination! How It Affects Job and Career Choices, Life Status, Overall Success.

It's good to be called Stricky, no-one has an abusive ex or was beaten up in school by someone with my name. It's completely unusual, few presuppositions can be formed based on it, and its near impossible to remember first time round, which suits me. Spell checkers highlight it in documents and spambots and data miners probably don't have it in their 'male first names' database. So I'm not sure I agree with the reports recommendation to give your kids 'normal', white-sounding names.