There are a number of factors discriminating between job candidates. These factors indicate who gets a job and who does not. Some of the factors are directly related to the candidate in other words it is under control of the candidate. Her skills, her education, her capabilities to present herself. But there are other factors that are not in the control of the candidate. She is just borned with it, namely her look and her name!
A recent paper which was recently published in the American Economic Association Journal investigated the link between the candidate name fluency and getting a job. The paper name is “How Do You Say Your Name? Difficult-To-Pronounce Names and Labor Market Outcomes”.
This paper analyzes the last two recent cohorts of PhD candidates. The paper finds strong evidence for labor market discrimination against individuals with names that are hard to pronounce!
Job candidates whose names are difficult to pronounce are less likely to be placed into an academic job or to land a tenure track position, and also are placed in jobs at lower ranked institutions, as measured by research productivity. These results of the paper are statistically significant and economically large in magnitude.
A one standard deviation increase in the difficulty of a candidate’s full name lowers the likelihood of obtaining an academic top ranked job between 4 to 7 percentage points.
