Applicants for jobs whose names are Asian are 28 percent less likely to be called for an interview, according to a study from researchers at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto, both in Canada.
NPR reports that even if all the qualifications are the same, job applicants in Canada with names of Indian, Pakistani or Chinese origin were passed over in favor of applicants with Anglo names.
Recommended For You
The study's researchers used data from a previous study, conducted in 2011, in which 12,910 fictitious resumes were sent out in response to 3,225 job postings. The previous study, also conducted in Canada, had similar results: applicants with Anglo first names and Asian last names didn't fare much better than applicants with Asian first and last names.
Jeffrey Reitz, a sociologist at the University of Toronto and one of the authors of the study, says in the report that the U.S. also engages in this type of discrimination.
In the report he is quoted saying, "Some people still believe that minorities have an advantage. These studies are important to challenge that and show that not only is this kind of discrimination happening, but it's quite systemic."
While studies indicate that Asian-Americans are prosperous and are one of the highest-income groups in the U.S., they don't recognize that as a group they're not treated equally compared with white Americans. In addition, there are prejudices about language barriers, although in many instances the job candidates were born in the U.S.
The report cites another two-year-long study published in the Administrative Science Quarterly Journal and its findings that Asian job candidates in the U.S. could nearly double their odds of getting a call back if they "whitened" their resumes by changing their names and excluding race-based honors and organizations. African-American candidates obtained the same results.
Another example in the report is that of Tiffany Trieu, a U.S.-born Asian-American who sought a graphic design job last year. She was turned down and got a letter from the studio's president saying, "We've hired so many foreign nationals that it seems time for us to hire an American, or be unfair."
Also last year, Palantir Technologies was taken to court by the U.S. Department of Labor for discriminating against Asian job applicants. DOL said that while 77 percent of Palantir's applicants for some engineering positions were Asian, less than 15 percent of the company's hires were Asian. The company has denied discriminating and the case is pending.
Such attitudes are pervasive; a Mother Jones report relates that, in 2009, Texas state representative Betty Brown suggested during House testimony that all Chinese-Americans change their names to ones "we could deal with more readily here."
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
