In a recent Canadian study, it has been found that job applicants with Asian names are less likely to get interview requests than those with ‘English’ names, regardless of your education.
Sucks to be us, as Malaysians, if we’re ever trying to apply for jobs in Canada or (let’s be real here) other Western countries.
Paul Nguyen, 36, who was born in Canada to Vietnamese immigrant parents, has also mentioned that the findings did not surprise him as he has personally seen better-educated visible minorities with a doctoral degree passed over for promotion in favor of a Caucasian with a bachelor’s degree.
How ridiculously unfair!
Nguyen’s parents have, in fact, decided to change his name to Paul when he was in Grade 8 because his original name, Phuong, was often misspelled or mispronounced. “It just makes it easier for me to navigate in the system”, he said.
Some of our fellow Malaysians’ names would then probably face the same unfortunate issue as Paul Nguyen.
Applicants in the study had fictitious names that were English (Greg Johnson and Emily Brown), Chinese (Lei Li and Xuiying Zhang), Indian (Samir Sharma and Tara Singh) and Pakistani (Ali Saeed and Hina Chaudhry).
Researchers have found from a new large-scale Canadian employment study, which examined interview callback rates for resumes with Asian and Anglo names, that job applicants with Asian names consistently received fewer calls regardless of the size of companies involved.
Asian-named applicants, as compared to Anglo-named applicants, gets 20.1 percent fewer calls from organizations with 500 or more employees, 39.4 percent and 37.1 percent fewer calls respectively from medium-sized and small employees.
Though it has been said that the disadvantage of an Asian name is less in larger organizations, this discrimination, admittedly, has not disappeared.
The study has found that for Anglo applicants with a master’s degree, the chances of an interview improved from 69.9 per cent to 81 per cent, or 11.1 percentage points — about the same percentage point increase as for their Asian counterparts (from 45.9 per cent to 56.5 per cent).
Although the positive effect of the extra higher education was undeniable, it was not enough to offset the overall disadvantaged discrimination of having an Asian name.
Blind recruitment has been suggested by Jeffrey Reitz, a co-author of the current study and sociology professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs, to greatly eliminate some of the employers’ biases.
Now you know that adopting an ‘Anglo’ name can be pretty useful for your next job application.
