When middle-age white men unintentionally come out on top
This is the funniest news item from Sweden in quite some time. You’re probably familiar with surveys where employers get two job applications that are virtually identically, only one of them is from an applicants named, say, Jamal Kwanzuu, while the other is from a Billy Bob Kosar. When the employer calls Mr. Kosar but not Mr. Kwanzuu to an interview, bias has been established.
In real life, resumes aren’t always and maybe even rarely quite as evenly matched, but the names of the applicants are still there. In order to get around the potential bias introduced by the ethnicity and sex implications contained in a name, the city of Växjö in southern Sweden decided to scrub the applications of any information that hinted at the age, sex, and ethnicity of the nineteen applicants to a job as principal.
Four of the applicants were called for interviews and that’s when total disaster struck: All four of them turned out to be men over 50 (the article doesn’t say, but I assume they were all ethnic Swedes to boot).
So now the hiring managers are asking for a do-over, as the saying goes, with the names of the applicants introduced at the resume-reading stage of the hiring process, a move that supposedly would make it easier for the mangers to understand and weigh the applicants’ “commitment” to the job.
Now, if you don’t trust your hiring managers to make a decision that isn’t influenced by irrelevant biases, why would you let them partake in the hiring process to begin with?
(Via Dick Erixon (landing page in Swedish))
