“If you’ve got the grades, the (0) SKILLS and the determination, this government will ensure you can succeed,” trumpeted David Cameron, the British prime minister, on 26th October, as he unveiled plans to tackle discrimination in the workplace. Ten big employers in the public and private (1)
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--including the civil service, HSBC and Deloitte-- have agreed to start recruiting on a “name-blind” basis in Britain; others may also follow suit. In such schemes, those drawing up shortlists of applicants cannot see their names, with the (2)
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of reducing racial and gender bias. But do they work?
Several countries have experimented with name-blind applications. In 2010 Germany’s Anti-Discrimination Agency, an advisory body, sponsored a voluntary scheme to get businesses to try it. In France a law (3)
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in 2006 made the anonymising of applicants’ CVs compulsory for firms of over 50 employees. But the government was slow in laying down the conditions for how the law would operate and only started enforcing it last year. In Sweden and the Netherlands (4)
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have been some trials.
Discrimination against job applicants based on their names is well documented, (5)
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among ethnic minorities. An experiment in Germany found that candidates with German-sounding names were 14% more (6)
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to be called for an interview than candidates with Turkish ones. A review of various studies by the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA), a German outfit, found that anonymised job applications boost the chances of ethnic-minority candidates being invited to an interview. A Swedish study found that it led to more ethnic-minority people being hired.
However, the results from other trials are less clear. A second Swedish experiment found that only women, not immigrants, were boosted by anonymous recruitment. According to the IZA, experiments in the Netherlands showed no increase in the likelihood of ethnic-minority candidates (7)
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offered a job if their CVs were seen anonymously, suggesting that discrimination had crept in at the interview stage.
Source adapted from: The Economist, October 31st 2015