
How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on a Resume (2016) - apsec112
https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-backfire-on-your-resume
======
hn_throwaway_99
Great study. I think this perfectly underscores the concept of what
"privilege" is, in a scientifically robust way.

I have a worry about one of the implied conclusions, though. The high-status
women were clearly discriminated against based solely on gender. However (and
trying to tread carefully here), it is at least possible that a high status
woman _would_ be more likely to leave for family reasons than a high status
man. That doesn't make the discrimination any better, but it also means the
employers aren't necessarily acting economically irrationally (of course,
there is also the chicken-and-egg problem, in that these high-status women
might be more likely to take up a domestic role because they're being
discriminated against in the first place). I say this not to give the
employers a pass, but to suggest that any real, durable solution to the
discrimination shouldn't automatically assume those social factors are
imaginary.

~~~
strken
It also underscores why there's backlash against the concept of privilege.
Lower-class men received the fewest job interviews of all four quadrants. Not
only do they not get the job, they also get put in the same analytical bucket
as the higher-class men.

~~~
stefco_
I think this is really important to acknowledge. Intersectionality (i.e.
subtlety and hollistic thinking) is actually a great way to think about
inequity. But a lot of people who are interested in intersectionality are
blind to many struggles specific to poor white males (I say this as a
relatively privileged person Far removed from that demographic). Poor white
males might skew more sexist and racist, but that is largely in response to
upbringing, poor education, and poor economic opportunities. It is a big blind
spot in many otherwise very liberal people's thinking to exclude poor white
males, and that exclusion breeds resentment from a potential ally in
addressing problems of inequity (and it contributes to a vicious cycle of
racism/sexism leading to exclusion leading to more racism/sexism).

Not saying this is an easy fix, but many other liberal people I know seem
shockingly uninterested in even treating this as a problem.

~~~
briandear
"Poor white males might skew more sexist and racist.."

[citation needed]

~~~
reitanqild
Not a native English speaker but I would take "might" in this setting to
signal "this might or might not be true and I am not necessarily endorsing
this view but..." or "one might argue that".

~~~
ralfd
I read this as "lets throw a "might" in to be less blatant, but this is what i
believe".

~~~
jessaustin
Do you agree then with GGP that personal beliefs require citation?

------
SilverSlash
I don't understand one thing though - Why doesn't she talk about the fact that
according to their own survey, lower class women were also 5 times more likely
to get a callback than lower class men.

So while upper class men have it the best, lower class men have it the worst.
But the author seems to be ignoring this entirely.

~~~
SubiculumCode
IDK, maybe something called confidence intervals?

~~~
SubiculumCode
Why did that deserve a downvote? The difference between lower class men and
women in that study was small,and I doubt that difference would meet a p=.05
confidence threshold. When it was said that lower class men are 4 times less
likely than lower class women to be invited to interview this was an
overstatement of the confidence we can extrapolate these results to the
population. But hey,if that wasn't clearly inferred by my comment, so be it.

~~~
tristor
You most likely got downvoted for being snarky and condescending, not for
pointing out the that the difference doesn't meet the confidence threshold.
Your follow-up is better because it at least provides a fully encapsulated
response, but you still have some snark in your tone. When replying try not to
imply that other commenters are stupid.

------
jzwinck
Sailing is a very stereotypical rich man's sport, and track & field is perfect
for the poor (low equipment and facilities costs). So it's no surprise the
research used these. But they are saddled with a confounding factor:
participant age.

The person reviewing your resume will likely be over 30 years old, maybe over
40. And they probably have more money than you. This makes it more likely that
they participate in sailing or golf and less likely that they do track &
field.

You may benefit from sharing an interest with your hiring manager or
recruiter, and maybe it just happens they like things enjoyed by adults with
money. Rather than judging you because you like cheap stuff.

A rich man's sport that doesn't favor older folks so much is crew (rowing).
That would have been a better choice than sailing IMO.

~~~
adjkant
> "The person reviewing your resume will likely be over 30 years old, maybe
> over 40. And they probably have more money than you. This makes it more
> likely that they participate in sailing or golf and less likely that they do
> track & field."

This isn't an error in the study in my opinion, it's a reason why
discrimination happens, which you've highlighted. People are more likely to
hire someone like them, who they can relate to. It's the same category as
"culture fit". It's something that people hiring need to consciously be aware
of and account for. That's a very reasonable conclusion from this.

------
jimmyswimmy
The clues may be less subtle and still affect employers decisions. I've read
thousands of resumes and I always get frustrated when I can read more into the
resume than may have been intended. Membership in the "hundred black men" or
the "Aidan American student organization" provides me with information I would
prefer not to know. Ideally when I review a resume I only want to know whether
or not I think you might be qualified and worth wasting time on a phone call.
Providing that information makes it harder for me to pretend that I am hiring
blindly.

The idea that there are even more subtle clues is fascinating. When hiring
engineers, such clues have remained entirely subliminal to me. There must be
some but honestly it wouldn't have occurred to me that there is a class
difference between those interested in sailing and those who like track and
field. I would probably guess that a track athlete would get along better in
my company. Perhaps we are just low class.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I always get frustrated when I can read more into the resume than may have
> been intended. Membership in the "hundred black men" or the "A[si]an
> American student organization" provides me with information I would prefer
> not to know.

Would you resent a resume from an applicant named "Mengying Zhou"? Would that
carry less information than membership in the Asian American student
association? I claim it carries more.

~~~
Armisael16
It's impractical to not mention your name; it's trivially easy to not mention
membership in a student organization. As such, including the membership
signals 'I want you to know this' in a way the name doesn't.

~~~
alew1
Recent graduates are encouraged to mention involvement in student
organizations when applying to jobs; leadership roles in those organizations
might speak well of a candidate. People might also put this information on a
résumé because they want to work somewhere where they know they will be
welcome. I am a teacher and I would certainly mention on my résumé that I am
the faculty advisor for the Gender/Sexuality Alliance (even if applying to an
engineering position). I am proud of my involvement as faculty advisor, and I
also would not want to work somewhere where my sexuality would be considered
any sort of liability.

Rather than expect applicants to take measures to whitewash their résumés
(which also gives an advantage to those applicants whose extracurriculars are
already "generic," i.e. upper-class and white), it seems we should be
educating employers to be aware of their biases when reading these résumés,
and teaching strategies for overcoming them.

~~~
Armisael16
I can't speak for the exact source of jimmyswinny's frustration, but it seems
to me that when you can be sued for discriminatory hiring policies your best
defense is to never have had that information at all (no means => unsuccessful
lawsuit).

Someone who deliberately and unnecessarily provides that information unasked
for is puncturing that protection.

Now, I don't hire people, but this seems to me like a perfectly rational
reason to be annoyed to know your applicants sexuality that has little to do
with personal bias.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Instead of relying on applicant's to redact information that you don't want to
see, why not have someone go through all of the applications and redact that
information? You could even go as far as redacting information such as the
applicant's name that it wouldn't be practical for the applicant to redact on
their own.

------
imjustsaying
This makes total sense. If you're high class, you're going to yield more
business for the firm if for no other reasons than deep social connections to
people who can afford to buy the firm's product.

If you're a woman, statistically you're more likely to work for the firm for a
brief time before you retiring to being a wife in your late 20’s or early 30’s
- a huge sunk cost for an elite firm that invests heavily in its employees.

If the firms were outright discriminating against someone unjustly due to some
kind of shadowy and insidious patriarchy or class hierarchy preservation
desire, they would get crushed in the free market for making systematically
wrong decisions. But given that they're the top 5% law firms, it looks like
their heuristics are correct - high class males are more often than not going
to make them a ton more money than other groups.

~~~
icebraining
So what you're saying is that the market system in which we operate promotes
and rewards gender discrimination even among people who wouldn't discriminate
otherwise.

So you agree with the concept of patriarchy in feminist theory.

~~~
imjustsaying
You can't avoid market forces. You might disagree with gravity but you're
still going to fall to the ground after jumping.

If you're suggesting that laws be created to satisfy a personal fantasy, you
must realize you're unavoidably advocating for creating artificial market
effects which put law firms out of business and increase prices for other law
firms, putting their availability further out of reach of poor people, and
women.

------
999natas
I don't see any _subtle_ cues here. An important skill for a lawyer is to know
how to present facts in the most favorable light. Take the study's James
Clark. He won a "University award for outstanding athletes on financial aid",
but it would be just as accurate for him to say simply that he won a
"University award for outstanding athletes". Why not mention financial aid?
Because it's not something that makes him a better lawyer. It doesn't serve
the purpose of the resume. I can just see someone reading the resume and
imagining all the dumb things James would write in a court filing and what the
result to the client would be.

~~~
sxyuan
That sounds plausible enough - except the authors also undertook a follow-up
study to determine the cause of the difference. The attorneys they surveyed
could have pointed to a lack of competence displayed in the resume writing, as
you suggest. Instead, they identified culture fit as the distinguishing
factor.

~~~
EliRivers
"culture fit" really has become the code of our time for "looks funny / speaks
differently / isn't the same as us".

------
emodendroket
I'd posit that young tech companies have similar problems, even if the
particulars are different than law firms.

~~~
iak8god
"cultural fit"

~~~
emodendroket
Yeah, like that one.

------
MichaelMoser123
The good thing about tech is that professional interview is more important
than the HR interview. No matter how bad a tech interview can be - non
technical professions have it worse

why do CV's even have an 'extracurricular activities'/'Personal interests'
section? (asking because i never had one in my CV) Is this exclusive to first
job applicants? another question: is having no awards better than having 'low
class awards' ?

(Ah, got it: they are looking for signs of a first impression bias - these
biases are likely to play a role during the interview process (given that
these biases exist) )

~~~
kolinko
As a person who did just a little bit of hiring for small projects: to find
people who are energetic and take matters in their own hands.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
that means i shouldn't mention hobbies in the CV unless i am in
mountaineering, is that right?

------
utnick
If I received a resume from a collegiate track person I would probably google
them out of curiousity to see how fast they were, and in this case I would
realize it's a fake name and resume, I wonder if that had any effect on the
results

------
dllthomas
Concerns I have, quite possibly addressed in the actual research but seemingly
not in an admittedly fast read of the article:

The advice seems to be "don't include things that hint you might be low class
(in some situations, at least)" \- but did they actually include that data
point in their analysis? Maybe a lack of class clues is treated as lower class
as well.

Second, the athletic component of the "lower-class combo" involves competing
against a smaller pool of other students, and might rightly be seen as less
impressive. If you're in the top 10 of all students, you're clearly also in
the top 10 of those on financial aid.

Third, pretty much all of the "lower-class combo" involves quite a few more
words. I'd be a little surprised if that had a big impact, but I sometimes
find myself surprised by the weird shit we react to.

------
brohoolio
I think the differences between gender are fascinating.

Upper class women are not selected for interviews because there is a
perception that they won't be as committed, implying they might get married
and stay home with the kids.

~~~
psyc
If, as the saying goes, women marry upwards, then the bias could also be
explained by how _attainable_ they're perceived to be.

edit: Lol. My goodness, HN does not like that idea much.

~~~
emodendroket
If the idea is that men are trying to hire women they can marry then you
should probably take into account the fact that cross-class marriages have
become very uncommon.

------
garfieldnate
Pretty fascinating finding! Interesting related book if anyone is interested:
Hillbilly Elegy. It's a personal memoir that extensively discusses the
struggles of working class whites, particularly Scots-Irish/hillbillies. It
helped me understand our last election better, as well.

------
Clubber
So, if I pretend to be interested in Polo or golf, the chances of getting a
better salary increase. Check.

~~~
rabidrat
You just provided a subtle clue about your gender.

~~~
Clubber
>You just provided a subtle clue about your gender.

Wait till they talk to me on the phone. That will be a huge clue.

I've always been fascinated with sailing but have never done it, so I'm going
to put that in my interests next time I update my resume.

I will need to remember to remove competitive spitting.

~~~
dentemple
Better yet, instead of going with a Mr/Mrs/Miss prefix, we should prepend our
names with "Captain"

------
tjalfi
The cited paper is available at
[http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/RiveraTilcsik.p...](http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/RiveraTilcsik.pdf)

------
rafinha
Maybe the interviewers bias resume selection to their own profiles. Because
most people come from elite families, mostly people from elite families get
interviewed.

------
VLM
Sometimes the most interesting data point is right out in the open and nobody
notices. The author thinks they understand what desirable is, and wrote a
paper about gender and class WRT to those closely held beliefs that I'm sure
is very interesting. However the truly interesting data point is almost nobody
is getting callbacks, failure rates varying from 99% to merely in the 90th
percentile.

We're not exactly talking about manned space missions where a 99% mission
failure rate wouldn't be tolerated. Or imagine if 99% of aircraft landings
ended in a fireball. We're talking about the small details of a system that on
a large scale is a miserable failure.

The author thinks they found the golden boy who everyone loves, but the
reality is virtually everybody is uninterested in those people.

I would theorize if I had 400 people with medical dwarfism apply to the NBA to
be pro basketball centers and then I abused the heck out of SPSS or R I could
eventually find a correlation between average skin color and callback rates or
perhaps maternal income and callback rates or presence of the father during
childhood or whatever. I'm sure it would be an absolutely fascinating paper.
But don't miss the forest for the trees, the real story is the people at the
NBA who hire pro basketball players hire approximately rounded down to zero
people under 4 feet in height, so even if they're subtlety or not so subtlety
biased about various demographic characteristics of dwarves, it really doesn't
matter because they don't hire dwarves to begin with. Of the people they
intensely and strongly dislike and will not hire, they dislike certain
demographics slightly less, but virtually all of them are still disliked
enough to have approximately zero chance of being hired anyway so it doesn't
matter.

Its like asking a Catholic convent of nuns what they like to see in a male
applicant, and they respond they slightly prefer Catholic male applicants
over, say, Jewish male applicants. Which superficially sounds like an
incredible religious discrimination scandal, until you point out that Catholic
nun convents accept essentially zero male applicants anyway, so ... if a
discrimination tree falls in a forest and no one hears it ...

~~~
devonkim
The lack of callbacks can be for all sorts of reasons, but I'd speculate that
a lot of the employers simply tried to do a really quick validation check
(name, school affiliation, etc.) that may even be automated and upon realizing
that the individual is made up didn't call back.

I think that this experiment indirectly showed how ineffective "cold-calling"
via resume-dropping really is for even highly qualified individuals (although
they'd have to do it with other industries perhaps for better validity, for
example). Meanwhile, I'm sure callback rates are probably higher for
industries with no shortage of demand for highly qualified individuals such as
software engineering. Law and medicine are a bit overwhelmed with more
students than there are jobs for them last I heard.

------
mariodiana
Just to add a bit of context, here's a NY Times article from 2005: "Many Women
at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/us/many-women-at-elite-
col...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/us/many-women-at-elite-colleges-set-
career-path-to-motherhood.html)

Among the well-heeled, the MRS degree is not quite dead.

------
wellpast
If I saw "University athletics award" on one resume and "University athletics
award for someone on financial aid" on another - I am going to be thinking
less, one of these persons is lower-class and more Why the heck is the latter
one almost going out of its way to be more wordy?

I would find the former more succinct and might intuit that this person were
better at expressing the essence of information. I'm not saying there isn't
bias but I'm not convinced that you can distill the conclusion to purely
class. People are complex and any attempt to fake a resume is going to trigger
spidey senses. Again I'm sure class-bias is there, but just questioning this
study's approach.

------
chrismealy
Who puts hobbies on a resume anyway? Who the fuck cares?

~~~
elchief
If you like skiing, and so does your potential boss, guess what?

~~~
draw_down
What?

~~~
bbcbasic
Rapport.

------
heynowletsgo
So nothing's changed, the status quo remains the most important thing.
Shocking. As to why, politics and the love of power. Nothing new.

------
HarryHirsch
I worked for Miss Lilly Pulitzer once. She was intolerable. The imperious
demeanor, the unwillingness to listen to reason, the papered-over
cluelessness, it did not work out well. Never again!

Here's a fun thought: elsethread age discrimination is discussed. If an
employer shouldn't be allowed to discriminate by age, should they be allowed
to discriminate by class?

------
tomjen3
Reading through their methodology, it seems that they screwed up in giving the
lower class person attributes that indicated second best: e.g outstanding
atlet vs outstanding atlet $IN_CATHEGORY, which is never going to be as
impressive.

------
na85
Does anyone still believe the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" narrative
any more?

My understanding was that it had been thoroughly debunked.

~~~
emodendroket
Paul Ryan has described the social safety net as a "hammock" that lures people
who are completely able to work into not doing so because they'd rather be on
welfare.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Do you have any evidence he is wrong? Most of the evidence I've seen (here are
mainstream descriptions of it) suggest he is completely right about that.

Currently California farmers are desperately raising wages in the hopes of
finding workers. Yet millions of able bodied men continue to sit at home
playing video games and consuming oxycontin, paid for by the social safety
hammock.

[http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-
immigration/](http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/)
[http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/](http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/)
[https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-
miserable-21...](https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-
miserable-21st-century/)

~~~
emodendroket
Here I was thinking we had an addiction crisis and weak labor market and it
turns out a bunch of people have made the completely rational determination
that shooting up heroin and collecting some of the stingiest welfare benefits
in the OECD is better than working.

I wonder, by the way, how carefully you read the article claiming "In our era
of no more than indifferent economic growth, 21st–century America has somehow
managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealthholders even as it
provided markedly less work for its workers" before linking it to prove your
claim that the unemployed are just too damn lazy to work.

~~~
yummyfajitas
As the CA farms going unstaffed show (or our 4.9% unemployment rate), we
clearly don't have a weak labor market.

If you believe welfare is "stingy", can you name a good or service that non-
workers lack? (Remember, I have a secret power - I sometimes read Census and
BLS reports and pull them out in internet arguments.)

 _I wonder, by the way, how carefully you read the article claiming..._

I read it carefully enough to separate the factual claims from the mood
affiliation. You should try it sometime.

~~~
emodendroket
U6 unemployment numbers and inflation-adjusted household incomes don't tell
the same story, and the anecdote about Californian farms hardly seems like
much to base an argument on. But you've got superpowers and are uniquely
capable of separating facts from opinion so why bother arguing with the
plebes?

~~~
yummyfajitas
U6 includes people who aren't looking for work but tell the survey take that
they might possibly take the right job if it were dropped in their lap.

Inflation adjusted hourly compensation has done nothing but rise.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB)

~~~
maxerickson
Check out table 4:

[https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2005/05/art1full.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2005/05/art1full.pdf)

For the bottom quarter by income, real wages are largely flat between 1979 and
the publish date of that pdf.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Chart 1 of your own source shows the reason for that - growth has been more in
benefits and less in wages. If you want to fix this, ban non-wage compensation
(e.g. employer sponsored health insurance, 401k, etc).

~~~
adjkant
Let's go back a second: you're claiming that blue collar unskilled labor jobs
are going unfilled, but are also arguing that the growth in pay is in
benefits. Yet, the jobs you say are going unfilled don't exactly have 401K
matching here...

And to be clear, I'm not taking either of those claims as true or false, just
highlighting the dissonance.

------
wruvjg
No comment on how lower class women got 5 times the callback rate of lower
class men? Almost exactly the rate at which upper class men outperformed upper
class women? Is this reporting on the study biased in any way?

~~~
SilverSlash
Exactly what I first thought when I read it. While upper class men have it the
best, lower class men seem to have it the worst. This was entirely ignored by
the author which is ridiculous. She is trying to hammer the point about bias
towards women while entirely ignoring the bias towards lower class men found
by her own survey.

~~~
GavinMcG
No, her research did a more in depth exploration of the difference between the
higher class groups.

It's legitimate to ask why that difference was studied while the other one
wasn't, but it's not legitimate to ask for speculation about the lower class
difference when it wasn't specifically studied.

~~~
FT_intern
If she was attempting to use gender as an independent variable, she should
have. The conclusions and research are very incomplete otherwise.

It looks like she is just slicing up the data to get the results she wants.

~~~
GavinMcG
That's the whole point! The first study had both dimensions; the second one
focused just on high-class to eliminate that variable.

------
ouid
the assertion that this is scientifically robust is pretty flimsy. I would
never hire anyone who listened to country music, regardless of background.

~~~
sctb
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13958567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13958567)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
ouid
This wasn't off-topic. I was pointing out that the methodology was very
different from the effect that they claimed.

The authors of the study chained correlations together and asserted a causal
effect. This is sloppy science.

------
mahyarm
That top header takes way too much space and there is no obvious was to
minimize it :/ Bad form.

~~~
emodendroket
Does every discussion need an aside where we all decry modern Web design and
pine for the halcyon days when pages didn't use JavaScript?

~~~
mahyarm
Most websites linked to here and other news websites don't have extra thick
top headers like that. It only shows up when you scroll down to the middle
too. When you scroll down today on most websites, the headers get smaller.
This is not about modern design, this is just bad.

See CNN for example: [http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/25/politics/donald-trump-
paul-rya...](http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/25/politics/donald-trump-paul-ryan-
inside-obamacare-repeal/index.html)

NY Times: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/us/politics/trump-
health-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/us/politics/trump-health-care-
defeat-gop-civil-war.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-
heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news)

Time: [http://time.com/4713270/las-vegas-strip-gunman-bus-
cosmopoli...](http://time.com/4713270/las-vegas-strip-gunman-bus-
cosmopolitan/?xid=homepage)

------
hasenj
Why do tens of thousands of people have to compete for a small number of
positions? Something it's clearly wrong.

It seems like the study treats working in a job as a favor received by the
peasants from the slave masters.

Or, the study purposely set up a scenario that matches this idea of what work
is.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
> Why do tens of thousands of people have to compete for a small number of
> positions?

Is this a serious question? Why are there tons of actors competing for an
infinitesimal shot in Hollywood? Because some people want to make more
money/prestige than less.

~~~
hasenj
It's a serious question because that is not the normal state of affairs.

Part of being a responsible adult should be about wisely choosing a career
that fits with who you are and has a reasonable future.

If you choose that kind of career, where you either make it to the top 1% or
spend the rest of your life broke, then I honestly have no sympathy for you if
you don't get selected to be among the 1%

~~~
somestag
Surely you must know that you're blowing down a straw man here.

Your statements all presume, for no reason, that these people are gambling,
and that if they lose their gamble they will have "no reasonable future."

The article is about law students. There is absolutely nothing unreasonable
for shooting for the top 1%, because if they don't make it they'll just end up
with a lawyer at a non-top-1% law firm. Their pay will be fine. (If they're at
the bottom of their class or whatever, that's a separate issue.)

In the case of actors, yeah; everyone knows being an actor is a bad economic
choice. Presumably those people have a definition of "reasonable future" that
accommodates trying for their dream, and then falling back on something else
if they fail.

In any case, discrimination is bad, even when it comes to moonshots. Surely
it's productive to analyze hiring trends and discuss whether or not
discrimination is, in fact, taking place.

------
andrewclunn
If you want to be judged based on your ability rather than people's biases or
your appearance, avoid "soft sill" professions. Just a word of advice.

~~~
emodendroket
"If you're from the wrong background just don't apply for prestigious, high-
paying jobs. Problem solved."

~~~
andrewclunn
You can't change the direction of the wind, but you can adjust your sails.
Practical advice about how the world works always pisses off people who are
more interested in bitching about how unfair it is.

~~~
icebraining
Unfathomable as it may sound, one can adjust one's sails _and_ still bitch
about how unfair it is.

~~~
andrewclunn
Something I never implied couldn't be done, but which others do, by virtue of
attacking any offering such practical advice.

------
ajross
The headline is just wrong. Yes, there was some correlation between "class
cues" and resume response rate. But the overwhelming finding (like, 4x the
effect!) was gender. Upper class _men_ were wildly more popular than any other
group. And in fact upper class women actually underperformed their lower class
sisters.

~~~
emodendroket
"Subtle class cues can backfire" seems like a factual assessment of the
finding that being a lower-class man or upper-class woman hurts your chances
of being called back.

~~~
ajross
But it's not symmetric. Women and lower class men don't get the same response
rates, but they're clearly in a cluster of broadly similar numbers. Upper
class men are _enormously_ advantaged in this study. And that finding is being
buried by the headline.

~~~
emodendroket
The finding for women is less pronounced but it's not what a lot of us would
expect and it's worthy of examination too.

~~~
ajross
But once more: if you had to write a _headline_ for this data, why pick a
subtle effect due to class instead of a glaring one based on gender?

~~~
icebraining
Because the sample size is bigger, hence the statistical significance is
stronger. The other is more likely to be a fluke.

------
mindcrime
Wait a minute... hang on.

 _Every fall, tens of thousands of law students compete for a small number of
coveted summer associateships at the country’s top law firms. ... For these
reasons, employment in top law firms has been called the legal profession’s
1%_

 _Our findings confirm that, despite our national myth that anyone can make it
if they work hard enough, the social class people grow up in greatly shapes
the types of jobs (and salaries) they can attain, regardless of the
achievements listed on their resumes._

Just when exactly did the bar for saying that somebody "made it" become
working for "the legal profession's 1%". That's a ridiculously high bar... to
the point of absurdity. And while it doesn't contradict the results
themselves, it certainly colors the interpretation.

I mean, if you think the only thing that matters in life is to be in the 1% of
your profession, then fine. But most people would be happy with a bar quite a
bit lower than that... a steady job which puts them solidly in the middle
class, or anything higher (in terms of socio-economic class).

Curiously, I feel like I see this "moving the goalpost" stuff quite often in
articles which try to argue against the idea of meritocracy or the importance
of work ethic and individual effort. Probably not a conspiracy, but perhaps a
form of bias..

~~~
brudgers
A meritocracy would provide equal access to the top of the profession -- the
suffix 'ocracy' is from the Greek and loosely translated as ruling or powerful
as in 'democracy' or 'theocracy'.

If people are limited or advanced on the basis of something other than merit,
then it is not a meritocracy.

~~~
aianus
But playing golf with your rich white male clients and putting them at ease is
a core requirement of this job. You literally can't do your job well as an
elite lawyer if you don't have a good rapport with rich old white people.

