So I have just had a quick look at what the Commission On Race and Ethnic Disparities had to say about hiring because one of the major developments over the past 20 years has been the use of social audit studies to examine discrimination #RacismReport 1/
This is where matched CV.s are sent to employers with job vacancies but differ on one variable such as race/ethnicity by simply using different names eg Grace Okunnu vs Alice Smith. Some studies use photographs 2/
The report mentions Di Stasio and Heath 2019 and Wood et al 2009. That’s it! No mention of the other work by Anthony Heath, Mike Noon and others. No mention of the work that says discrimination for some groups has not declined since the 1960s! 3/
What does the report say? I quote: ‘We know that discrimination occurs, but these experiments cannot be relied upon to provide clarity on the extent that it happens in every day life’. Again, these studies used matched applications for real everyday jobs in Britain. 4/
No they are not making a subtle point on statistical inference. Instead the studies are damned because ‘... it is unclear if the effect is about race, class or perceived foreign culture.’ Obviously whoever wrote this has not actually read these and other studies. 5/
This matters because recruitment is not simply the work of a few bad individual managers scattered across the country. It is an institutional process involving HR depts and function managers. How institutionalised is that! 6/
P.S. I did a little word count: number of words describing the studies: 111. Number of words of criticism: 131. ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ Ends/
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
