Sunday, April 14, 2013
African American Woman With College Degree Pretends To Be White & Job Offers Skyrocket!
Greetings Colleagues,
Recently, I came across a video that really made me question whether there is really equality in the workplace: Yolanda Spivey is an African American woman who was unemployed for two years. Despite having a decade's worth of experience in the insurance industry and a college degree, she had applied to and was turned down for over 300 jobs. Spivey wrote in a Techyville that as an experiment, she first started "declining to state" her ethnicity on Monster.com's Diversity Questionnaire, but that had no effect. Spivey then created a fake profile, with identical information, except her fictitious job candidate was white, and was aptly named "Bianca White" Suddenly, responses from employers came pouring in. How do you think this connects to higher education? If students realized that their job opportunities in the workplace were limited after attaining a degree, would that affect student enrollment in higher eduction for particular student groups? The link to the video is below. Let me know what you think....
http://youtu.be/9MktF3WLuso
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Thank you Marques. This is incredible. It is disappointing that it happened,but I like stories that showcase humans thinking outside the box.
ReplyDeleteCiao!
There is literature in psychology that examines race and voice and how people react to voice over the phone. I don't recall if the literature was in the context of a phone interview or just customer service, but people of minority races were treated differently over the phone because of their voice.
ReplyDeleteIn the higher education context, I don't know if this anecdotal evidence would stop students from pursuing higher education. If employers are asking for students who understand diversity, who have global perspectives, etc., then one would think that the race of the applicant would not hurt an applicant. In some of the research on sport and athletics in higher education, there are myths that African American athletes are not intelligent. From this video, it seems that similar myths are in the workplace too.