More on why Lakisha and Jamal didn’t get interviews: Extending previous findings through a reproducibility study

Abstract

In 2004, Bertrand and Mullainathan published an innovative piece of research that involved sending nearly 5,000 fictitious resumes to employers. Their paper is commonly cited for finding that applicants with White-sounding names benefitted more from experience on their resumes and received 50 percent more invitations to interview than other applicants. The current research, however, demonstrates that while Bertrand and Mullainathan made a critically important contribution to the literature on employment discrimination, there is still much more that we can learn from their data. Through a reanalysis of Bertrand and Mullainathan's data, we find that discriminatory effects were stronger in conditions in which a job posting's experience requirements were ambiguous, applicants with first names of Arabic origin experienced higher levels of discrimination than applicants with other non-White-sounding names, and that the discriminatory effects of having an African-American-sounding name could not be empirically differentiated from the discriminatory effects associated with a name's frequency within the overall population. Our findings contribute to the literature on human information processing and offer important practical contributions regarding how employers can potentially reduce discrimination in selection processes. Additionally, we offer important suggestions for the development of racial manipulations in future experimental research.