A name appears near the top of almost every résumé.

Ideally, it should tell an employer very little about whether someone can do the job.

But researchers have used names for decades to test whether employers respond differently to otherwise similar candidates when a name signals perceived race or ethnicity.

Those studies have repeatedly found differences in callback rates in some hiring settings.

One of the best-known U.S. experiments found that résumés assigned names perceived as White received 50% more callbacks than otherwise comparable résumés assigned names perceived as African American (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004).

More recent research has found similar patterns on a much larger scale—but also an important nuance:

The size of the difference varies considerably across employers.

So the evidence does not support saying every recruiter discriminates based on names.

It does show why employers should be careful about allowing assumptions triggered by a candidate’s name to influence an evaluation that should be based on qualifications.

Note: This article provides general information about hiring and workplace diversity. It is not legal advice.

What to Know About Name Bias in Hiring

Research on résumé and correspondence experiments shows that:

• names can act as signals of perceived race or ethnicity;

• several U.S. field experiments have found different employer response rates when researchers change names while keeping applicant qualifications comparable;

• a 2022 experiment involving more than 83,000 fictitious applications found lower employer-contact rates for distinctively Black names than for distinctively White names;

• those differences varied substantially across employers rather than appearing equally everywhere;

• a meta-analysis of U.S. field experiments found persistent hiring disparities affecting Black and Latino applicants;

• résumé studies measure employer responses to signals contained in applications—they do not reveal the conscious motivation of every individual recruiter; and

• federal law prohibits employers from making hiring decisions because of protected characteristics such as race or national origin.

(Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Kline et al., 2022; Quillian et al., 2017; U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC], n.d.)

What Is Name Bias in Hiring?

In this article, name bias refers to differences in how candidates are evaluated or treated when their names signal perceived race or ethnicity.

Researchers often study this through correspondence experiments.

In a basic résumé experiment, researchers create fictitious job applications with similar qualifications and randomly change certain characteristics—such as the applicant’s name.

They then submit those applications to real job openings and compare employer responses.

Because the résumés are designed to be comparable, differences in callback rates can provide evidence that the signal researchers changed affected the outcome.

These experiments are particularly useful because they observe responses to actual job applications rather than asking employers how they think they would behave.

A 2021 review in the Annual Review of Sociology identified more than 140 field experiments across 30 countries examining racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring (Quillian & Midtbøen, 2021).

What Did the Famous Résumé Name Study Find?

The study most commonly associated with name bias was published by economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan in the American Economic Review in 2004.

The researchers sent fictitious résumés in response to job advertisements in Boston and Chicago.

They randomly assigned names intended to signal either African American or White applicants.

The study found that résumés with names perceived as White received 50% more callbacks for interviews than those with names perceived as African American (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004).

The study also varied résumé quality.

Improving the résumé produced a larger increase in callbacks for applicants with White-signaling names than for applicants with African-American-signaling names.

Those results were influential because the qualifications were constructed experimentally while the employer responses occurred in the real labor market.

But the study took place more than two decades ago.

That raises an obvious question: Do newer experiments still find name-related differences?

What Does More Recent U.S. Research Show?

A much larger study published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2022 provides more recent evidence.

Patrick Kline, Evan K. Rose, and Christopher R. Walters analyzed a nationwide correspondence experiment involving more than 83,000 fictitious applications sent to jobs posted by 108 large U.S. employers.

Applicant characteristics were randomly varied.

The researchers found that distinctively Black names reduced the probability of employer contact by 2.1 percentage points compared with distinctively White names (Kline et al., 2022).

But the study found something else that matters just as much:

The difference was not evenly distributed across employers.

Racial contact gaps varied substantially between companies.

The researchers found that firms in the highest fifth of measured racial discrimination accounted for nearly half of the lost employer contacts to Black applicants in the experiment (Kline et al., 2022).

That complicates the idea that name bias works the same way everywhere.

The evidence suggests that hiring disparities can be concentrated within particular organizations and recruiting systems.

What Do Multiple Studies Show Together?

One experiment can tell us what happened in one particular research design.

A meta-analysis can tell us whether similar patterns appear across many studies.

Quillian and colleagues analyzed U.S. field experiments of hiring discrimination involving 55,842 applications submitted to 26,326 positions.

Across studies conducted since 1989, White applicants received an average of:

• 36% more callbacks than Black applicants, and

• 24% more callbacks than Latino applicants.

The researchers found no evidence of a decline over time in hiring discrimination against Black applicants during the period they studied, while finding modest evidence of a decline for Latino applicants (Quillian et al., 2017).

Importantly, not every experiment in that literature relies exclusively on names, and not every study produces identical findings.

The broader conclusion is therefore stronger than saying: “A certain type of name always causes discrimination.”

The research instead documents systematic differences in employer responses to racial and ethnic signals across many field experiments, with effects varying by study and context.

Does a Name Tell Employers Someone’s Race or Ethnicity?

Not with certainty.

Names are signals, not definitive demographic information.

Someone’s name cannot reliably tell an employer everything about their racial or ethnic identity.

That is also a limitation researchers have to consider when designing résumé experiments.

In these studies, names are typically selected because previous data or testing suggests that they are associated with particular demographic perceptions.

The experiment therefore measures employer responses to the perceived racial or ethnic signal attached to the name, not the applicant’s actual identity.

That distinction is important when interpreting the research.

Can the Way a Name Sounds Matter Too?

Potentially.

A 2024 study published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy examined name fluency, or how easy a name is perceived to be to pronounce.

Researchers Qi Ge and Stephen Wu found that name difficulty was associated with labor-market outcomes in their study of economics PhD candidates.

They also reanalyzed data from earlier audit studies and found that name complexity explained part—but not all—of the penalties associated with ethnic names in those datasets (Ge & Wu, 2024).

That adds another layer to the discussion.

A name can potentially activate several perceptions at once.

Researchers therefore need to be careful about claiming that every difference associated with a name reflects one single mechanism.

For employers, the practical point is simpler: A candidate’s name is not evidence of their ability to perform the job.

Does Name Bias Mean Employers Are Intentionally Discriminating?

Résumé studies generally cannot answer that question about each decision-maker.

They measure behavioral outcomes.

If two comparable applications receive different response rates after researchers randomly change a racial or ethnic signal, that provides evidence of differential treatment.

It does not necessarily reveal whether an individual recruiter consciously thought:

“I am rejecting this person because of their race.”

Correspondence experiments are typically designed to measure differences in hiring behavior rather than identify the psychological motivation behind every employer response.

That is one reason this article focuses on what the studies found, rather than assigning motives to individual employers.

What Does Federal Employment Law Say?

A person’s name is not itself listed as a separate protected category under Title VII.

The relevant legal issue is the characteristic on which an employment decision is based.

The EEOC states that employers may not discriminate against applicants because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or other characteristics protected under the laws it enforces.

It also states that employers may not base hiring decisions on stereotypes or assumptions connected to those protected characteristics (EEOC, n.d.).

So the employment-law question is not: Did the résumé contain a particular name?

It is: Did race, national origin, or another protected characteristic improperly influence the employment decision?

Whether any specific hiring decision violates the law depends on the facts and applicable legal standards.

Should Employers Remove Names From Résumés?

Removing names during an early résumé review is sometimes proposed as one way to reduce the information available to evaluators.

But the research discussed in this article does not establish anonymous résumés as a universal solution to hiring discrimination.

A candidate’s identity may become visible later in the hiring process.

Other information on an application can also signal demographic background.

And hiring decisions involve much more than résumé screening.

A more comprehensive question is:

How structured is the evaluation process once an application enters the system?

Employers can define job-related qualifications in advance and apply those criteria consistently across candidates.

That connects directly with broader approaches to structured candidate evaluation rather than relying on impressions generated by names, schools, addresses, or other details unrelated to job performance.

What Can Employers Take From Resume Studies?

Résumé experiments do not provide a single formula for eliminating hiring bias.

They do provide evidence that seemingly irrelevant signals can influence access to the next stage of employment.

Employers can respond by examining the structure of their own hiring process.

Define Criteria Before Reviewing Candidates

Decide which qualifications genuinely matter before reviewing applicants.

This makes it easier to keep the evaluation focused on the requirements of the position.

Apply the Same Standards Across Applicants

Comparable candidates should be assessed against the same job-related criteria.

Diversity.com’s existing guide to fair candidate evaluation explains how structured, job-related assessment can be built around defined competencies rather than shifting impressions.

Look at Outcomes Across the Hiring Funnel

The 2022 large-employer experiment found substantial variation between organizations (Kline et al., 2022).

That suggests employers can learn something by examining where candidates advance—or stop advancing—within their own process.

The goal is not to assume that every difference proves discrimination.

It is to understand whether the system produces patterns that deserve closer review.

Why Name Bias Matters for Workplace Diversity

A candidate’s name usually appears before an employer sees their work.

That makes résumé screening one of the earliest points at which access to opportunity can narrow.

A person can have the required education, experience, and skills and still never reach the interview stage.

That is why name bias belongs in the Diversity.com conversation.

Workplace diversity is not only about who employers ultimately hire.

It also involves who receives a meaningful opportunity to compete.

The research does not tell employers to lower standards.

It points toward the opposite:

Make qualifications—not assumptions associated with a name—the basis of evaluation.

Final Thoughts

A name should not tell an employer who can do a job.

Yet decades of résumé experiments show that names—and the racial or ethnic signals employers may associate with them—can influence who receives a response.

The scale of the effect is not identical across studies or employers.

That nuance matters.

The evidence does not justify assuming that every recruiter treats candidates differently because of their names.

It does justify asking whether hiring systems leave too much room for information unrelated to job performance to shape early decisions.

For Diversity.com, that gets to a basic principle of fair opportunity:

Candidates should have the chance to compete based on what they can do—not what someone assumes after reading their name.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is name bias in hiring?

In this article, name bias refers to differences in how candidates are evaluated or treated when their names signal perceived race or ethnicity.

Résumé correspondence studies test this by assigning different names to otherwise comparable fictitious applications and comparing employer responses.

Do Black-signaling names receive fewer callbacks?

Several U.S. field experiments have found lower employer-response rates for résumés assigned distinctively Black names.

The 2004 Bertrand and Mullainathan study found that White-signaling names received 50% more callbacks, while a much larger 2022 experiment found a 2.1-percentage-point reduction in employer contact for distinctively Black names (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004; Kline et al., 2022).

These results should not be interpreted as meaning every employer treats names differently.

Do résumé studies prove every recruiter is biased?

No.

Field experiments identify differences in employer responses across the settings studied.

The 2022 research found substantial variation between companies, showing that the effect was not distributed evenly across employers (Kline et al., 2022).

Are names protected under employment discrimination law?

A name itself is not a separate protected category under Title VII.

However, federal law prohibits employment discrimination because of characteristics including race, color, religion, sex, and national origin (EEOC, n.d.).

Should companies use anonymous resumes?

Anonymous résumé review is one possible process design, but the sources reviewed here do not establish it as a complete or universally effective solution.

Employers still need consistent, job-related evaluation throughout the hiring process.

Related Articles

• What Is Colorism at Work? Understanding Color Discrimination

• Who Gets the Office Housework? How Non-Promotable Tasks Affect Career Equity

• Fair Chance Hiring: What Employers Should Know About Criminal Records

• The Motherhood Penalty at Work: What Research Actually Shows

Sources & References

• Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94(4), 991–1013. https://doi.org/10.1257/0002828042002561

• Ge, Q., & Wu, S. (2024). How do you say your name? Difficult-to-pronounce names and labor market outcomes. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 16(4), 254–279. https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20220611

• Kline, P., Rose, E. K., & Walters, C. R. (2022). Systemic discrimination among large U.S. employers. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 137(4), 1963–2036. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjac024

• Quillian, L., Pager, D., Hexel, O., & Midtbøen, A. H. (2017). Meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(41), 10870–10875. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1706255114

• Quillian, L., & Midtbøen, A. H. (2021). Comparative perspectives on racial discrimination in hiring: The rise of field experiments. Annual Review of Sociology, 47, 391–415. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-090420-035144

• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (n.d.). Prohibited employment policies/practices. Retrieved October 1, 2026, from https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices