essay COURSE CITIATIONS ARE ATTACHED

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Abercrombie and Fitch

• ”All American Look”

• Racial discrimination lawsuit

• Job positions based on ethnicity

• Gonzalez v. Abercrombie and Fitch

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employers rarely, if ever, contact applicants via postal mail to set up interviews.

E. Weaknesses of the Experiment

We have already highlighted the strengths of this experiment relative to previous audit stud- ies. We now discuss its weaknesses. First, our outcome measure is crude, even relative to the previous audit studies. Ultimately, one cares about whether an applicant gets the job and about the wage offered conditional on getting the job. Our procedure, however, simply mea- sures callbacks for interviews. To the extent that the search process has even moderate frictions, one would expect that reduced interview rates would translate into reduced job offers. How- ever, we are not able to translate our results into gaps in hiring rates or gaps in earnings. Another weakness is that the resumes do not

directly report race but instead suggest race through personal names. This leads to various sources of concern. First, while the names are chosen to make race salient, some employers may simply not notice the names or not recog- nize their racial content. On a related note, because we are not assigning race but only race-specific names, our results are not repre- sentative of the average African-American (who may not have such a racially distinct

name).28 We return to this issue in Section IV, subsection B. Finally, and this is an issue pervasive in both

our study and the pair-matching audit studies, newspaper ads represent only one channel for job search. As is well known from previous work, social networks are another common means through which people find jobs and one that clearly cannot be studied here. This omis- sion could qualitatively affect our results if African-Americans use social networks more or if employers who rely more on networks differ- entiate less by race.29

III. Results

A. Is There a Racial Gap in Callback?

Table 1 tabulates average callback rates by racial soundingness of names. Included in brackets under each rate is the number of re- sumes sent in that cell. Row 1 presents our results for the full data set. Resumes with White

28 As Appendix Table A1 indicates, the African- American names we use are, however, quite common among African-Americans, making this less of a concern.

29 In fact, there is some evidence that African-Americans may rely less on social networks for their job search (Harry J. Holzer, 1987).

TABLE 1—MEAN CALLBACK RATES BY RACIAL SOUNDINGNESS OF NAMES

Percent callback for White names

Percent callback for African-American names Ratio

Percent difference (p-value)

Sample: All sent resumes 9.65 6.45 1.50 3.20

[2,435] [2,435] (0.0000) Chicago 8.06 5.40 1.49 2.66

[1,352] [1,352] (0.0057) Boston 11.63 7.76 1.50 4.05

[1,083] [1,083] (0.0023) Females 9.89 6.63 1.49 3.26

[1,860] [1,886] (0.0003) Females in administrative jobs 10.46 6.55 1.60 3.91

[1,358] [1,359] (0.0003) Females in sales jobs 8.37 6.83 1.22 1.54

[502] [527] (0.3523) Males 8.87 5.83 1.52 3.04

[575] [549] (0.0513)

Notes: The table reports, for the entire sample and different subsamples of sent resumes, the callback rates for applicants with a White-sounding name (column 1) an an African-American-sounding name (column 2), as well as the ratio (column 3) and difference (column 4) of these callback rates. In brackets in each cell is the number of resumes sent in that cell. Column 4 also reports the p-value for a test of proportion testing the null hypothesis that the callback rates are equal across racial groups.

997VOL. 94 NO. 4 BERTRAND AND MULLAINATHAN: RACE IN THE LABOR MARKET