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- A recent study found that applicants with Black names have 2.1% fewer chance of getting contacted.
- The study submitted 83,000 entry-level applications to 108 fortune 500 companies.
- Black Americans are severely underrepresented in higher-paying corporate jobs.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of California Berkeley found that people with "distinctively Black names" have a lesser chance of being contacted for an interview compared to employees with white names.
Researchers submitted more than 83,000 entry-level job applications to 108 fortune 500 companies in the US. What they found, was that applicants with Black names had a 2.1% less chance of getting contacted.
The National Bureau of Economic Research published a working paper on the study, noting that 7% of all jobs included in the experiment discriminated against Black names, but that number jumped to 20% when looking at the 23 companies the researchers "reliably label as engaged in racial discrimination."
The companies that ranked in the top fifth of the study for racial discrimination were responsible for nearly half of the incidents of "lost contacts to Black applicants."
In recent years a handful of Fortune 500 companies have been hit with lawsuits for breaking civil rights laws. Google, Target, Coca-Cola, Fox News, and more have all paid out millions of dollars in settlements over accusations of discrimination against employees, and companies including Amazon, Facebook, Morgan Stanley, and McDonalds have all been accused of racially discriminatory behavior.
Black Americans are severely underrepresented in higher-paying corporate jobs, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics found in a 2018 study. Similarly, white Americans outrank Hispanics in management, professional, and related occupations, the highest-paying major occupational category. Asian Americans were the only ethnic group with a higher share of jobs in that category than white workers.
