
Can fake names create bias in interviewing? - derwiki
http://blog.interviewing.io/can-fake-names-create-bias/
======
manfredo
I suspect many companies wouldn't use this as it would make affirmative hiring
policies more difficult. For example, recruiters at my company curate lists of
names that are majority female, black, or Hispanic (pulled from the census
bureau) in order to try and determine which candidates are diverse.

Recruiters at my company aren't explicitly told to hit certain quotas, but
they are given larger bonuses for diverse hires and they do have targets for
certain percentages of diverse candidate.

Maybe I'm assuming that Bay Area hiring practices are more universal than they
really are. Perhaps Bay Area tech companies are under particular pressure to
increase the percentage of diverse employees. For instance my company is
targeting 33% female tech employees, but most data says women comprise ~20-25%
of the tech workforce. Tough to reach those targets without some sort of bias.

For what it's worth I don't think our diversity hiring practices result in any
lowered caliber of hires. Most of the affirmative hiring policies only affect
resume review and technical phone interviews.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
I'd hate to work somewhere knowing I was hired because the color of my skin
and not my abilities. maybe less of an issue in non-brainy jobs, but in Tech I
would feel more insecure not knowing if I got the job to fill a quota. This
sounds rather disgusting to me.

~~~
OpieCunningham
Subconscious bias means your concern is applicable regardless of your skin
color or gender. If you’re a white male, you could easily have been hired
simply because of your skin color and gender and not your abilities.
Effectively, your point is moot. Maybe worry less about the thoughts and
feelings of who hired you and focus on doing your best work.

~~~
mamurphy
>If you’re a white male, you could easily have been hired simply because of
your skin color and gender and not your abilities.

This may have been the case decade(s) ago, but I think the climate is very
different now. With the prevalence of social "justice" hiring policies, I'd be
much more confident I was hired because of ability, rather than to fill a
quota, as a white male than any other race/sex combination.

Sadly, affirmative action creates "mismatch" that often worsens the problem it
is trying to solve. Minorities are highly recruited to fill quotas, even if
less capable. This (1) puts them in over their head setting them up to fail
and (2) creates a perception that the minorities are inherently less qualified
(rather than the truth, that they are being over-selected for).

One of many articles on this topic:
[https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-
sad-...](https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-irony-of-
affirmative-action)

~~~
OpieCunningham
> This may have been the case decade(s) ago, but I think the climate is very
> different now.

I don't. I've met many incompetent white males in over their heads.

~~~
mamurphy
There are tons of people over their heads, everywhere, of all races and sexes.

But as the other person who replied to you noted, people now are openly
stating that they want to avoid hiring white males.

>Sadly I've had to bring up my genetic background recently as a pure survival
mechanism because people keep telling me to my face that they don't want to
hire white men so I need to let them know I'm not white so I don't get
instantly filtered out.

In recent times, I have not heard that more frequently about any other
race/sex combination. To me it's undeniable that the hiring climate has
changed drastically.

~~~
OpieCunningham
You were stating that "things have changed" in response to my statement that
white males are often hired because of subconscious bias. That there are
recent diversity hiring programs does not mean that white males are no longer
hired because of subconscious bias.

Clearly, diversity hiring programs are new things that did not exist decades
ago.

~~~
mamurphy
Ah, to be clear: Subconscious biases still exist to some degree. In recent
years, in government and large corporations, diversity hiring goals have
completely dominated the hiring process compared to subconscious biases.

I don't think you agree with that statement; if you did, would you think that
it is a good result? I don't. I don't think the solution to past unfairness is
to tilt the see-saw in the other direction, creating more unfairness.

You replied to another poster:

>Good. Then we're in agreement that hiring for diversity is of no detriment.
Incompetent white people are hired because of subconscious bias and
incompetent people of color are hired because of diversity goals. We've
achieved equality.

I disagree strongly, and I somewhat agree with that poster's response to you.
To me, equality means equality of process. To reclaim a phrase: equal
opportunity -- not equal results. All bias is bad and should be fought
against. Anti-bias training, examining disproportionate results to see if bias
was an underlying cause, and race/sex-blind hiring, all are possible steps in
the right direction.

To correct for subconscious bias for white males with conscious bias against
them hardly seems the path towards equality.

~~~
OpieCunningham
> Ah, to be clear: Subconscious biases still exist to some degree.

Subconscious bias still exists to a huge degree. Studies have been done, and
it is fairly obvious, that show increased diversity has a positive effect
towards decreasing subconscious bias. I would propose that we give these
hiring diversity goals, say, 100 years. Then we can circle back to see about
making some adjustments towards a determination as to whether subconscious
bias has effectively been eliminated.

> In recent years, in government and large corporations, diversity hiring
> goals have completely dominated the hiring process compared to subconscious
> biases. I don't think you agree with that statement; if you did, would you
> think that it is a good result?

I do agree that in recent years diversity hiring goals have increased
significantly. And I do think it is a good course of action.

> I don't think the solution to past unfairness is to tilt the see-saw in the
> other direction, creating more unfairness.

When your vehicles steering is misaligned, do you counter steer in the other
direction or do you drive around in circles all day?

> To me, equality means equality of process.

That's a lovely ideal. It doesn't exist. You've already stated that you admit
subconscious bias exists "to some degree". So the process is already unequal.

With diversity hiring, more people of color will be hired, both competent and
incompetent. Without diversity hiring, more white people will be hired, both
competent and incompetent. There is no evidence that shows conscious bias
favoring people of color results in more incompetent hires vs. subconscious
bias favoring white people. That is the process: incompetent people get hired,
race has nothing to do with it. In order to hire more competent people of
color, diversity hiring is required (diversity is also required to, over time,
progressively decrease the prevalence of subconscious bias). More people of
color hired (competent or incompetent) naturally means fewer white people
hired (competent and incompetent). I fail to see why that is an issue, unless
you are consciously or subconsciously biased to favor white people and/or
oblivious of how change is a result of action.

> To correct for subconscious bias for white males with conscious bias against
> them hardly seems the path towards equality.

It may hardly seem like a path towards equality, but in fact it is (see
steering analogy). That it may feel "unfair", well, in regards to that all I
can say is "Sorry. But think of it this way, now you know how it feels for
people of color. Lack of privilege kinda sucks." If there were another method
of addressing pernicious subconscious bias favoring white people I'd be all
for it. Doing nothing is obviously not a solution.

------
mattigames
The obsession with biases is a form of bias, you not only have to check what
fake name you are submitting, you must make sure the people reading it are the
same, that the mood of the people reading its the same and that their way of
thinking hasn't changed much; such psychological uncertainties are the same
reason psychology experiments are hard to replicate. Not to mention the
randomness of things like if your resume was the first one thew saw or the
last one, and many other things you have no knowledge or control over.

~~~
ASpring
I completely agree that the questions that we choose to ask determine the
knowledge that we get. This experiment is clearly situated within the
positivist view of research.

However I don't think that invalidates the result, the whole point of
randomization of people into the conditions (here the names) is to control for
these latent variables like you've talked about (way of reading, mood, etc).

Are you critiquing randomization in general or this specific experiment?

~~~
camelNotation
Randomization solves for the problem, that's true, but that isn't what people
are arguing when they criticize social science research like this.

Theoretically, if you have X number of factors you can't control for, then
there should be some threshold Y where the sample size benefits from random
selection and accounts for those factors. Right now, social scientists have
formulas they use to establish what is and is not an acceptable population
when doing experiments like this.

The problem that is being identified (and can't be stated often enough,
honestly) is that human emotional preferences and variability of experience
means that X is far more variable than anyone can conceive. A human being is
an extremely complex biological system and that complexity compounds when you
begin comparing people to one another and in groups. So unless you are
actively controlling for every possible factor in that system, the assumption
that you can use any formula to establish a reasonable population size Y is
absurd.

Anyone with half a brain can see this, but social science has to deliver on a
product and justify its existence with research funding, so it developed
standards - like the aforementioned formulas - that allow it to ignore the
problem of identifying X and instead just assuming their synthetic Y will do.

This is the real reason why psychologists have a replication crisis and why
they always will. Many of them don't even use the standards they have because
honestly, they all realize it's nonsense to begin with.

~~~
ASpring
Thanks for this comment, it's well thought out and elucidates what the
original poster is probably critiquing.

I want to make sure I'm understanding, are you saying that there is no sample
size with which you would be comfortable making a conclusion about this?
That's what I'm taking away from this comment "the assumption that you can use
any formula to establish a reasonable population size Y is absurd."

~~~
camelNotation
What I mean is that social science research will only ever be able to speak to
the samples they are studying. That's usually okay, though, because typically
in an experiment with difficult variability, you can gain certainty through
replication. With social science, the variability in human beings is so
significant that I don't think replication works the same way. I think you
would need to replicate studies about a dozen times across different cultures,
timeframes, languages, regions, religions, etc just to even begin approaching
something like reliable results.

And given the fact that social science has a replication problem (an
understatement if I'm right), the entire area of study is suspect.

------
onewhonknocks
This reminds me of an interesting Harvard study I read a few years ago titled
'Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal'.

It can be found here:
[https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/are_emily_an...](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/are_emily_and_greg_more_employable_than_lakisha_and_jamal.pdf)

~~~
iguy
IIRC this was one of the studies whose name list was criticised for having a
lot of class differences as well as claimed race differences: when the authors
sat down to invent white- and black-sounding names, they picked high-class and
low-class names, thus injecting their own stereotypes into their data.

~~~
VikingCoder
I saw another study where they found phone numbers for mental health
professionals, and they called and left a message, asking someone to call them
back to set up a first appointment.

The had _other people_ rate the voices as "sounds black" / "sounds white," and
"sounds white-collar" / "sounds blue-collar."

That way, they measured the correlation between "sounds black" and "doesn't
get call backs."

As you can imagine, "white" sounding people got more call backs. And "white-
collar" sounding people got more call backs. I don't know if they reported
which was more beneficial, sounding white, or white-collar.

My point being, if you have a large enough collection of names, and you
_measure_ how the candidate appears to them, you can then correlate the
appearance with the outcome, showing the bias against that appearance.

You don't need to have the researchers generate their own candidates.

------
peruvian
Heh. I have a very Hispanic name but I am white/European. This is fairly
common where I am originally from and even more in other places. I've
definitely gotten weird looks when I go from phone screen -> in person
interview. Unfortunately Americans, even progressive ones, have a very narrow
view of what "Hispanic" means.

~~~
manfredo
Same boat here. I am Cuban, but basically completely white. A lot of people
don't realize that Hispanic is a cultural designation that encompasses
multiple races. Many are of native or mixed Central and South American
descent. Many are black, descendants of Africans. Many are white. Peru has a
large Japanese diaspora, so I guess it's possible to have Asian Hispanics as
well (though I've never met anyone that identifies as such).

~~~
peruvian
Yep. One of our presidents was Japanese-Peruvian, and I went to school in Peru
with a few people with Japanese first and last names.

~~~
manfredo
Interesting! Out of curiosity, how integrated were the Japanese students into
Peruvian society? Did they fluently speak Spanish? Did they consider
themselves Hispanic (though I think "Hispanic" is more of a term North
Americans apply to South and Central Americas, so apologies if this last
question is hard to answer)?

~~~
peruvian
> Interesting! Out of curiosity, how integrated were the Japanese students
> into Peruvian society?

100% integrated, considered themselves Peruvian, couldn't tell the difference
without looking at them. The immigration was decades if not a century before I
grew up.

------
40acres
Given names is one of the most effective way to encode culture. We already
know that individuals harbor some biases based on culture, so it's no surprise
that there is some bias when people exchange names.

My mother explicitly gave me a "white sounding" name when I was born and in my
experience changing your name is one of the most common ways that those from
other cultures try to integrate in America and minimize bias.

There are many people in my corporation that are South East Asian but go
anglicized names like: John, Kevin and Mary. They usually keep the family name
though.

~~~
acomjean
> in my experience changing your name is one of the most common ways that
> those from other cultures try to integrate in America and minimize bias.

My grandfather changed our family name (which to be fair was spelled very
badly when character sets were converted). It’s funny because nobody knows
what ethnicity “Comjean” is. People get confused and they are thinking about
it. Adding to the confusion my parents gave me a first name from the old
country.

People in moments of candor ( or from New York) have told me 1. I don’t look
like my name . And 2 misguessed my country of origin often putting me into
their own.

------
hhs
I think there are lots of factors involved with names, but yeah.

Even the spelling of names makes a difference. Interesting example: Dale
Carnegie deliberately changed his last name from "Carnagey" to "Carnegie" so
people, on some subliminal way, may associate him with the classy steel-
building Andrew Carnegie family.

~~~
rchaud
Charlie Sheen's birth name is Ramon Estevez. Despite it's "liberal bias",
Hollywood is notorious for its preference for "Real American (TM)" names.

~~~
rdc12
And his dad, Martin Sheen's birth name was Ramón Gerard Antonio Estévez

------
smelendez
I guess I don't see the point of these names? Why not just Candidate A,B,C or
1,2,3, etc.

~~~
eli
Yup, this is called "blind hiring" and it's a thing.

[https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-
magazine/0418/pages/ca...](https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-
magazine/0418/pages/can-blind-hiring-improve-workplace-diversity.aspx)

------
hiei
I always considered something similar with my name. For example if my legal
name is Ronnie should I put Ron/Ronald on professional resumes/LinkedIn? Even
though that's not my real name. Or Donnie vs. Don/Donald. Tommy vs.
Tom/Thomas. It just seems anything ending in "ie,y" appears less professional.

~~~
blihp
I probably would. I think the problem is that so many people associate ie/y
with nicknames for kids that it biases them. I'd probably use Ron initially
and then when you get to the face-to-face interview stage you can let people
know that you generally go by Ronnie if they ask. HR isn't going to care what
you go by online or your resume as long as the 'official' paperwork you submit
is correct.

------
aerovistae
"infinite avalanche" is a commonplace, boring phrase? Wonder where he's from.

~~~
haditab
Sounds like he's super white.

------
kristianc
Some words are prettier than others. All of the words in the first list are
quite long and fantastical, whereas the latter are fairly common assonant word
pairs. It's natural that the first then are more evocative and have nicer
associations.

------
sokoloff
As a hiring manager, if you give me a fake name, it is to your advantage if
it's the same fake name you use on LinkedIn, github, stackoverflow, and other
sites that are going to come up when I google you...

I don't care about your social media accounts, your country of origin, your
gender, or anything else that's irrelevant to your performance, but I do care
about your technical history and abilities (and of course, your eligibility to
work).

~~~
cimmanom
TFA is about the company assigning randomized pseudonyms to candidates.

~~~
sokoloff
I understand. Whether the candidate, a researcher, or my in-house recruiter
mangles the name, the end effect is the same.

~~~
cimmanom
Why? I can get being pissed if someone's misrepresenting their identity (or
annoyed if they're representing it inconsistently) as a job seeker.

But AFAICT this is about letting the candidate's performance be
mentally/emotionally isolated from all the baggage that comes along with their
history. It doesn't even preclude screening people out based on history before
this anonymized interview.

You can then put it back together with the other information you have about
them once you've formed an opinion of their technical abilities without
preconceptions about them.

~~~
sokoloff
I guess my perspective is shaped by the fact that I'm likely hiring very
senior folks, where I'm going to look through my network to see if I know
anyone who knows them. For that purpose, doing the evaluation "semi-blind" and
then later putting the real name/profile back on to do network and reference
checks is even OK. (Even in that case, the real hiring decision is subject to
skew by knowing the full details of the candidate, and often the resume/work
history alone is uniquely identifying.)

I agree that it's 100% fair that we should be evaluating software engineers on
software engineering abilities not names (and not even colleges to be honest).

------
stcredzero
I think I've seen many people on reddit assume I'm an urban high school kid
because of my username.

~~~
throwawaymath
stcredzero? "Urban high school kid" isn't jumping out at me.

...Actually, nothing jumps out at me at all. I'm not sure _what_ to make of
it. Why do they read high school kid out of that?

~~~
chrinic83
"Millennial" here.

stcredzero.

Street credit. Usually referred to as social status in the neighborhood and
local friend groups. Usually used by rappers and African American
neighborhoods. However, people living in these neighborhoods don't actually
say this today. Typically middle and high school students hear this on
TV/radio and use it in their own (usually upper/middle class) circles to
increase their social status.

Zero refers to zero street cred. Username plays a pun, the the user actually
has zero cred. Again, only used by people outside the "street" aka in middle
and high school. Also 98% chance OP is male. I'd say 50-60% white, sice we're
on HN. With the other 40-50% being Asian or Indian.

In summary, yes, usernames tell you a lot.

~~~
stcredzero
_Also 98% chance OP is male. I 'd say 50-60% white, since we're on HN. With
the other 40-50% being Asian or Indian._

 _In summary, yes, usernames tell you a lot._

But site demographics tell you a lot more!

