Bertrand and Mullainathan’s paper showing how a white sounding name vs. a black sounding one is far more likely to get called back when submitted on a resume just won’t get out of my head!

Table 2, on page 30 of this paper has a table I just can’t stop thinking about. It reports that if Brad submits a hundred resumes he will get 16 calls, while Rasheed can expect to get 3.

People like to talk about how hard working and dedicated immigrants are. Well now we know why Rasheed’s so hard working. He’s scared! He’s going to have to work five times harder than Brad to find a new job if he looses the one he’s got.

It suggests something about why there seem to be so few participants of non-european ancestry involved in Open Source. They are common in Silicon Valley. Just maybe they don’t want to take the risk.