A name that is hard to say can cost its owner on the job market. Economists Qi Ge of Vassar College and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College found that candidates with less pronounceable names landed fewer good jobs and got fewer callbacks, even after accounting for ethnicity.
Their paper appeared in the November 2024 issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. The authors say no earlier study had tested whether pronunciation itself, rather than what a name signals about race or ethnicity, affects hiring.
Three ways to rate a name
The first data set was the academic job market for economists. The authors collected the CVs of more than 1,500 candidates from 96 top-ranked economics PhD programs in the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 hiring cycles, then traced where each person was first placed.
To score pronunciation, they used three separate measures. One was an algorithm that rates how common a name’s letter and sound combinations are for a native English speaker. Another was the median time people took to say the name aloud. The third was a subjective rating from three independent raters. The results held across all three and after controls for PhD program and country of origin.
Fewer academic jobs, fewer callbacks
A one standard deviation increase in name difficulty cut a candidate’s chance of an academic job by about 3 percentage points in the main model. Across specifications, harder full names reduced the odds of an academic job by 3 to 12 points and of a tenure-track post by 1 to 6 points, and those hired were placed at institutions roughly 70 to 80 spots lower in the RePEc research productivity ranking.
The authors then reanalysed two classic audit studies, in which fictitious resumes differ only by name. In Bertrand and Mullainathan’s 2004 US experiment, a one standard deviation harder name was linked to 1.7 points fewer callbacks overall. Even among resumes with distinctly African American names, harder names lowered callbacks by 1.1 points, a 20% change in that group’s callback rate.
In Oreopoulos’s 2011 Canadian study, a harder name meant 1.4 points fewer callbacks. Adding name difficulty to the model shrank the penalty for Chinese, Pakistani and Indian names by 7, 14 and 22 percent. Overall, the authors estimate that name complexity accounts for roughly 10 to 50 percent of ethnic name penalties.
A penalty that falls on weaker resumes
In all three data sets, the penalty was concentrated among candidates with weaker resumes. The authors read this as a sign of cognitive cost: processing and remembering an unfamiliar name takes effort, and recruiters may only spend that effort on standout candidates. They argue this is a different channel from the taste-based or statistical discrimination that dominates earlier work.
They acknowledge that the economics PhD market is one specialised labour market and that their placement ranking is an imperfect measure of job quality.
The findings also carry a practical warning for researchers. Audit studies that compare names across racial or ethnic groups, the authors write, should choose names of similar pronunciation difficulty or control for it, or they risk counting a fluency effect as pure ethnic bias.
Study Details:
- Title: How Do You Say Your Name? Difficult-to-Pronounce Names and Labor Market Outcomes
- Authors: Qi Ge, Stephen Wu
- Journal: American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
- Publication Date: November 2024
- DOI: 10.1257/pol.20220611