Both of my children have common first names. Their mother was in favour of weird names, but my feeling was that giving your child an unusual name consigned them to a lifetime of having to spell their name for people, or having to deal with mispronunciations of their name. My preference for common names was based purely on reducing the direct costs to my children, and not on how it might affect their labour market outcomes.
However, I have probably underestimated the negative impacts of having difficult-to-pronounce names. This recent working paper by Qi Ge (Vassar College) and Stephen Wu (Hamilton College) shows some significant negative effects, in the form of labour market discrimination. And those effects are independent of ethnicity. Ge and Wu note that:
Although many ethnic sounding names are also difficult to pronounce, particularly for those outside of that particular racial or ethnic group, there is still variation in the fluency of names within particular groups. For example, most non-Chinese speakers would consider Chen to be more familiar and easier to pronounce than Xiang; people without a Polish background will generally have much more trouble trying to pronounce the surname Przybylko than they will with Nowak.
Even after controlling for the ethnic or racial origin of one’s name, there are a few reasons that individuals with hard-to-pronounce names may experience worse outcomes in the labor market. There may be subconscious bias against those with difficult-to-pronounce names, leading potential employers to have more negative evaluations for these applicants and be more critical of their profiles. Recruiters will also have an easier time processing and remembering names that are more fluent and/or familiar sounding. Some individuals on hiring committees may undertake the mental effort to remember difficult sounding names, but others may not.
Ge and Wu conduct three analyses to demonstrate the labour market effects of name fluency (how easy a name is to pronounce). First:
...we utilize observational data from the academic labor market by assembling curriculum vitae (CV’s) of over 1, 500 economics job market candidates from 96 top ranked economics PhD programs from the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 job market cycles and find that name fluency is significantly related to job market outcomes. Specifically, candidates who have difficult-to-pronounce names are much less likely to be initially placed into an academic job or obtain a tenure track position, and they are placed in jobs at institutions with lower research productivity, as ranked by the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database. Our results are consistent and robust across three separate ways of measuring pronunciation difficulty: an algorithmic ranking based on commonality of letter and phoneme combinations, a survey-based measure that records the average time it takes individuals to pronounce a name, and a purely subjective measure based on individual ratings.
Ge and Wu then re-analyse data from two seminal studies on labour market discrimination: (1) this 2004 study (ungated version here) by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, where the researchers sent out CVs that had either an African American name or a non-African-American name; and (2) this 2011 Canadian study (ungated version here) by Philip Oreopoulos, where CVs were sent out with Indian, Pakistani, or Chinese names, and compared with those sent out with English names. In these re-analyses, Ge and Wu find that:
In analysis of data from Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004), we find that job applicants with less fluent names have lower callback rates, even after accounting for the implied race of the candidate. What is particularly striking is the fact that within the sample of resumes with distinctly African-American names, name fluency is still strongly correlated with callback rates. We also document similar results using data from another prior audit study by Oreopoulos (2011). Once again, job applicants are less likely to be called back when they have names that are difficult to pronounce, and even when restricting the sample to immigrants with ethnically Indian, Pakistani, and Chinese names, those whose names are less fluent are significantly less likely to be called for a job interview.
Ge and Wu used three different measures of name fluency in their three analyses:
...a computer-generated algorithm that assesses the difficulty of pronouncing various words, a rating based on the median time it takes for people to pronounce a particular name, and a subjective measure based on three independent raters.
They receive similar results regardless of how they measure name fluency. Ge and Wu also explore which mechanisms may be behind the apparent discrimination, concluding that:
For job searches at academic, governmental, and research institutions, an initial screening generally involves committees getting together to discuss names of potential candidates, which may lead to some subconscious discrimination against names that are harder to pronounce and/or remember. This may also occur in the settings of prior audit studies, where recruiters must decide which applicants to call for potential interviews. Another possibility is that there are mental costs to processing and remembering less fluent names, and that these mental costs are only worth spending on higher quality candidates or when the jobs carry significant stakes. Additional analysis from both observational and experimental data seems to support this explanation. In particular, we find that PhD job market candidates with relatively weak profiles or from non-top PhD programs are more likely to suffer from name penalty in their search for academic positions. Likewise, we document similar patterns from separate analyses of Black... and Indian, Pakistani, and Chinese... applicants: those who are less qualified and have weaker resumes tend to encounter much greater discrimination due to name pronunciation than those who are more qualified and have stronger resumes.
All in all, there is some strong evidence that having difficult-to-pronounce names is negative for labour market outcomes, on top of any ethnicity-based labour market discrimination. While the study context is the US academic job market (at least for the primary analysis), it seems likely that this effect would appear more broadly across the labour market (and the secondary analyses of the two prior studies support this). It is little wonder, then, that some people choose to change their names in employment applications, as noted in a new report on Pacific workers in New Zealand prepared by the Human Rights Commission (as reported in the New Zealand Herald this week).
The solution is somehow to reduce the mental costs associated with difficult-to-pronounce names. Could that be as simple as greater exposure of people making hiring decisions to a range of different ethnic groups, or specific training in cultural intelligence, or something else? We will need some further (experimental) studies on this to find out.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
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