Well, not quite – I’m sure most people have thought about the impact of their names on their outcomes in life – possibly the best known in the public pop-economics sphere in Dubner and Levitt’s Freakonomics, where the matter was analysed in an American context.

Recently, there was a brief flurry about the differing rates of reponse to job applications by applicants of differing ethnic backgrounds - the result of a study at the Australian National University, where researchers had sent out 4000 fictional applicantions to various advertised entry level positions.  In short, the study showed that applicants who had “ethnic” sounding names – in this case, those of Indigenous, Italian, Chinese and Middle-Eastern background – had significantly lower levels of response than those applicants who had “Anglo” sounding names,*   when the applications were identical except for the name of the applicant.  Predictably, this set off the usual firestorm of debates about racism, immigration, employment, and society in general.  

 Being the nerd I am, I did download the full paper for a slightly more intellectual read on the tram home than the good old Mx.  Apart from my curiosity, and being of Chinese extraction myself, I rather guiltily turned to the appendix to see which were the “Chinese” names used in the experiment.  After my  usual huff that they hadn’t got the ratios of popularity of two-syllable to one-syllable names correct (two-syllable names are far more common, particularly in the Chinese diaspora population, but there was only one in the list of ten used. This is a slight issue I have with most English-language literature with Chinese supporting characters, including Kerry Greenwood’s otherwise excellent Phryne Fisher chick-lit detective novels, but that’s by the by),  quite aside from feeling rather sorry for the poor people at the other end of the process who had to flick through 4000 fake CVs,  and called back non-existent candidates, it did raise some very interesting questions, but perhaps not exactly the ones that I thought it would.

Naturally, the significantly different results obtained for CVs that were identical but for the name of the applicant, are alarming.  I would hazard to guess that most of the prospective employers who unwittingly took part in the experiment would be surprised to realise that they did.  I certainly don’t think there’s anything that can be done about the subconcious decisions people make in hiring, short of demanding that people leave their names off their applications (in which case, the snap decision as to whether to call a candidate can be on something else peripherally relevant), and probably says more about stereotypes than anything else, particularly the variance in the call-back rates depending on the nature of the different jobs.   It would be interesting to see if there were the same differences in a broader range of positions, though I imagine that with more skilled or senior positions, it would be much harder to sneak identical CVs through without someone getting suspicious! 

Then it did bring me to what was perhaps most pertinent to me – as most people who do work in Australia as realised, the vast majority of persons of Chinese extraction who live and work in Australia do have Anglicised names for general public use (and, most people, like me use their Chinese names as their middle names) – something I imagine a number of persons of non-English speaking backgrounds, with names that might be difficult to pronounce, do.   I wonder if there might have been a difference with the use of anglicised names – though, of course, the “ideal world” response is that it ought not, but there’s probably a large enough balance in both camps to be able to construct some interesting statistics out of it.

I was surprised though, at the automatic assumption in the press and in discussion that the  the adoption of names was simply for the benefit of the exclusively Anglophone.  Particularly in a multicultural society, the adoption of an anglicised name is, these days, I think more for the assistance of  benefit of non-English speakers rather than English speakers.   A case of English being the lingua franca, so to speak, for the very many disparate groups who now call Australia home.  

There’s a place for pride in one’s heritage, one’s background, one’s past, one’s principles. 

And there is a case of just being practical. 

A very interesting topic, nonetheless, and something I’m really going to have a good long think and percolate about – and maybe a longer post!

 *One notable exception was found in Melbourne, where an Italian sounding name resulted in far more interest from a prospective employer if you were seeking a position as a waiter or waitress