When sending out resumes to potential employers, individuals with African-American-sounding first names often are penalized for their ethnicity.

Indeed, for a company that isn't interested in diversifying its workforce, an ethnic-sounding name on a resume is an easy way to screen out at least a significant number of people of color or foreigners. Conversely, it can serve to attract the attention of a diversity-minded employer, and work to the jobseeker's interest.

Certainly, a name can speak volumes to a potential employer, no matter what the position on diversity. Crystal McArthur, an associate director for the Rutgers University Career Services in New Brunswick, N.J., said, "I can see how that could serve to aid companies who want to screen minorities out." She added, however, that it is difficult to judge why certain people don't get a call back, especially in a sluggish economy where jobs are hard to come by.

In a recent study by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively, almost 5,000 comparable resumes, differing only in the ethnicity of the name listed on the top of the page, were sent out in response to want ads.

The results of the study yielded surprising implications. Resumes with white-sounding names, such as Emily and Brendan, received 50 percent more call backs than African-American names, such as Lakisha and Jamal.

According to the study, the name discrimination affects all types of companies. The occupations included in the study ranged from clerical work in a mailroom to management of sales at a large firm. A large pool of employers was included, but the findings of discrimination levels were the same across all the occupations and industries. The two professors wrote, "Federal contractors, who are more severely constrained by affirmative action laws, do not discriminate less; neither do larger employers or employers who explicitly state that they are an 'Equal Opportunity Employer' in their employment ads."

The reality is, that even at large corporations, it still is individuals in human resources who head the process of narrowing down resumes. "Human resources is there to do the screening and they will apply their personal views and preferences unless the management outlines a specific direction for them to take," said Kenneth Roldan, CEO of Wesley, Brown & Bartle Co., a New York City-based search firm that specializes in diversity and military-recruiting assignments. "Some companies are taking the initiative and breaking down barriers with diversity sensitivity training, but they need to apply that training as well. People need to be exposed to diversity. Otherwise, those skills grow outdated and are forgotten. It's like learning a language."

Often, managers will opt to hire people with whom they feel more comfortable. They worry whether they will have cultural compatibility with a diverse individual when they have not been exposed to any diversity in the past. "There needs to be a strong commitment at the top to ensure diversity," Roldan said. This isn't limited to just African-American names either. McArthur said many people who have negative attitudes about immigrants can use ethnic-sounding names to filter them out. Bertrand and Mullainathan suggested that more than personal relations may be at stake. "Perhaps employers are inferring more than just race from applicants' names," they wrote. "More specifically, maybe employers are inferring social class. When employers read a name like 'Tyrone' or 'Latoya,' they may associate that name with the ghetto or other disadvantaged social background."

Roldan agreed that a disparity of educational resources does still exist, but there is a myth out in the corporate world that qualified African-American candidates don't exist, when they do. "There are a couple of myths out there: one, that people of color don’t exist: African Americans wouldn't be qualified or interested in exploring certain professions. Two, they're very family- and community- oriented and wouldn't want to relocate. Oftentimes, the misperception on the part of the employer is that Hispanics don't want to leave Miami and African Americans don't want to leave Atlanta." In this way, candidates with ethnic names get pigeonholed and eliminated according to their perceived interests or lifestyles before even getting to the interview stage where they can clarify their individual situations and preferences.

"It is a double-edged sword," said Roldan. "Someone may be inclined to remove an African-American fraternity from their resume, use a middle name, just an initial, or a married name to hide their ethnicity, and not get the job just as well, because they had removed precisely what the employer was looking for."

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