The Name Study: What the Resume Research Actually Shows — And What It Doesn’t

In 2004, two economists at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a study that would become, in the two decades since, one of the most frequently cited pieces of evidence in the American conversation about race. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan sent nearly 5,000 fictitious resumes in response to over 1,300 help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago. The resumes were identical in every respect except one: half bore names that were distinctively white — Emily Walsh, Greg Baker — and half bore names that were distinctively Black — Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones. The result was unambiguous: the white-sounding names received 50% more callbacks for interviews than the Black-sounding names. The study was titled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?” and the answer, according to the data, was yes.

This study has been deployed, for twenty years, as a conversation-ender. It has been used to prove that the labor market is fundamentally racist, that individual effort cannot overcome systemic bias, that the playing field is so tilted that the game is rigged before it begins. And every one of those deployments is based on a reading of the study that is simultaneously accurate and incomplete — a reading that grasps what the data shows but refuses to grapple with what the data does not show, what the data cannot show, and most importantly, what the productive response to the data might be for someone who is not content to treat a research finding as a reason for despair.

Let us do what almost no one in this conversation does. Let us read the entire study. Let us read the replications. Let us read the critiques. And let us then ask the question that the study itself cannot answer but that the people it describes must answer: given this data, what do you do?

What the Study Actually Found

The headline finding is real and it is damning: a 50% gap in callback rates between identical resumes with white-sounding and Black-sounding names. In absolute terms, the white-sounding names received callbacks at a rate of approximately 9.65%, compared to 6.45% for Black-sounding names. This gap was consistent across occupations, across industries, and across employer sizes. It was present in both Boston and Chicago. It did not diminish when the quality of the resume was increased — in fact, Bertrand and Mullainathan found that higher-quality resumes produced greater returns for white-sounding names than for Black-sounding names, suggesting that the discrimination operated not as a flat penalty but as a glass ceiling on the returns to qualification.

These findings have been replicated. Kang, DeCelles, Tilcsik, and Jun, in a 2016 study, found that Black and Asian job applicants who “whitened” their resumes — removing racial cues from their names, activities, and organizational affiliations — received significantly more callbacks than those who did not, even from employers who explicitly stated commitments to diversity. Nunley, Pugh, Romero, and Seals, in a 2015 study using a similar methodology, confirmed the racial callback gap and found that it was larger for applicants to jobs requiring more customer interaction.

Lincoln Quillian and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of every field experiment on hiring discrimination conducted in the United States since 1989 and found that the level of discrimination against Black applicants had not changed in nearly three decades. Twenty-six years of diversity training, affirmative action policies, and corporate commitments to inclusion, and the callback gap had not budged.

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955

What the Study Does Not Show

Here is where the conversation must become more rigorous than it usually is, because the limitations of the study are not reasons to dismiss it — they are reasons to understand it more precisely, and precision is the enemy of both denial and despair.

First, the study measures callbacks, not hiring. A callback is the first step in a multi-stage process. The study does not tell us what happens at the interview stage, the offer stage, or the employment stage. It is possible — and some researchers have suggested — that discrimination at the callback stage is partially offset by other dynamics at later stages. It is also possible that it is compounded. We do not know, because the study was not designed to measure those stages.

Second, the study is geographically concentrated. The data comes from Boston and Chicago. These are two Northern cities with specific racial histories, labor markets, and demographic compositions. The results may or may not generalize to Southern cities, to rural areas, to the technology sector in San Francisco, or to the energy sector in Houston. Subsequent studies in other locations have found similar patterns, but the magnitude varies considerably.

Third, and most controversially, the study cannot fully disentangle race from class. The names used in the study — Lakisha, Jamal, Tamika, Darnell — are not merely racially distinctive. They are also, as some critics have pointed out, associated with specific socioeconomic backgrounds. A study by Fryer and Levitt found that distinctively Black names are correlated with indicators of lower socioeconomic status, and that this correlation — rather than, or in addition to, racial animus — may explain some portion of the callback gap. This does not make the discrimination acceptable. Discrimination based on perceived class is not morally superior to discrimination based on race. But it does affect how we understand the mechanism and, therefore, how we design responses.

The Productive Response

Here is the question that the study, by its nature, cannot answer, and that the conversation around the study almost never asks: given that resume discrimination exists, what is the most effective response for the individuals who face it?

There are two categories of response, and they are not mutually exclusive: structural solutions that change the system, and individual strategies that navigate the system as it is. The mistake that the right makes is to ignore structural solutions. The mistake that the left makes is to treat individual strategies as surrender. Both mistakes are costly, and the people who pay for them are the ones submitting the resumes.

The structural solutions are well documented and, where implemented, effective. Ban-the-box policies, which prohibit employers from asking about criminal history on initial applications, have been shown to increase callback rates for people with records — though, in a perverse unintended consequence documented by Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr, they may also increase statistical discrimination against Black applicants without records, as employers who cannot see criminal history rely more heavily on racial assumptions. Blind resume review, in which names and identifying information are removed before evaluation, eliminates the callback gap entirely in the studies that have tested it. Structured interviews, in which all candidates are asked the same questions and evaluated on the same rubric, reduce the influence of implicit bias on hiring decisions.

The Entrepreneurs Who Bypassed the Resume

But there is another category of response that deserves more attention than it receives, because it represents not merely a navigation of the system but a refusal to be defined by it. There are Black Americans — and their number is growing — who have looked at the resume game and decided not to play it. Not out of despair, but out of strategic clarity. They became entrepreneurs.

The resume discrimination research measures what happens when you ask someone else for a job. It measures, in other words, the cost of economic dependence. It does not measure what happens when you create your own job, because when you are the employer, no one is screening your name. When you own the business, the callback gap is irrelevant. When you are the one doing the hiring, the entire paradigm that the study documents — the paradigm of supplication, of application, of hoping that someone behind a desk will judge your qualifications without judging your name — ceases to apply.

This is not a naive suggestion that entrepreneurship is easy or universally accessible. It is not. The barriers to Black entrepreneurship are well documented: lower access to startup capital, smaller professional networks, less inherited wealth to absorb early losses. But it is an observation that the most powerful response to a system that discriminates at the front door is to build your own building. And the data on Black entrepreneurship, while showing persistent gaps, also shows persistent growth — particularly in the digital economy, where the traditional gatekeepers that the resume study measures have less power.

Consider the mathematics of the callback gap from an entrepreneur’s perspective. A 50% gap in callbacks means that a Black applicant must send roughly 15 resumes to get one callback, compared to 10 for a white applicant with an identical resume. That is five extra resumes per callback, multiplied across a job search, multiplied across a career. It is a real cost. But it is a cost measured in the currency of dependence — in the currency of asking someone else for permission to work. The entrepreneur does not pay this cost. The entrepreneur pays different costs, and they are substantial, but they are costs that do not depend on someone else’s assessment of your name.

The Network Strategy

The resume study also illuminates, inadvertently, the power of network-based hiring. The study measured what happens when strangers evaluate anonymous resumes. It measured, in other words, the coldest possible form of job seeking — the form in which the applicant has no relationship with the employer, no referral, no introduction, no prior contact. In this scenario, the name on the resume becomes a proxy for everything the employer does not know about the applicant, and racial bias fills the information vacuum.

But most jobs are not filled this way. Research consistently shows that between 60% and 85% of jobs are filled through personal networks — through referrals, introductions, and relationships. In network-based hiring, the name on the resume is less important because the applicant comes with a voucher — someone the employer knows and trusts has said, in effect, “this person is worth your time.” The referral partially neutralizes the bias that the resume study documents, because it replaces the information vacuum that bias fills with actual information from a trusted source.

This has a strategic implication that the conversation about resume discrimination almost never addresses: the most effective individual response to callback discrimination is not to submit more resumes. It is to build a stronger network. It is to invest in relationships with people who have the power to refer, to introduce, to vouch. It is to attend the industry events, join the professional organizations, cultivate the mentors, and build the social capital that converts a cold application into a warm referral. This is not fair. It should not be necessary. But it works, and it works precisely because it bypasses the mechanism that the study documents.

“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”
— James Baldwin

Both Truths at Once

The intellectual challenge of the resume discrimination data is that it requires holding two truths simultaneously, and most people are willing to hold only one. The first truth is that the discrimination is real, it is persistent, it has not improved in decades despite every institutional effort to address it, and it imposes a measurable cost on every Black person who participates in the traditional labor market. This truth must not be minimized, denied, or explained away, because to do so is to gaslight an entire community about its lived experience.

The second truth is that the discrimination, while real, does not constitute a sentence. It does not foreclose opportunity. It does not make success impossible. It makes success more expensive — which is itself an injustice — but expensive is not impossible, and the conflation of the two is the most disempowering misreading of the data that a person can make. The 50% callback gap means that a Black applicant must work harder to get the same result. It does not mean that the result is unattainable. And the strategies that reduce or eliminate the gap — networking, entrepreneurship, skill specialization in high-demand fields, building a personal brand that supersedes the resume — are available to anyone willing to invest in them.

The people who use this study to argue that effort is futile are doing more damage than the discriminating employers. The employer imposes a tax. The defeatist eliminates the income. A 50% callback gap is a problem to be solved. It is not a destiny to be accepted. And the people who have solved it — through entrepreneurship, through networking, through building reputations that make the resume irrelevant — have demonstrated that the study describes a barrier, not a wall. Barriers can be climbed, circumvented, or demolished. Walls exist only in the minds of people who have decided that the barrier is permanent.

The name on the resume matters. The data is clear. But the person behind the name matters more, and what that person does with the knowledge that the game is rigged — whether they quit the game, or learn to play it better, or build a different game entirely — is the only question that the study leaves unanswered. And it is the only question that matters.