Australian bosses are racist when it is time to hire: Study

Melbourne, June 18 (ANI): Three Australian National University researchers-Alison Booth, Andrew Leigh and Elena Vargonova - have through a study, discovered that Australian employers are racist when they are on a hiring mission.

Booth, Leigh and Vargonova said that they sent out 4000 fake job applications to employers advertising on the internet for entry-level hospitality, data entry, customer service and sales jobs, changing only the racial origin of the supposed applicants' names, and they found that applicants with Chinese names fared the worst, having only a one-in-five chance of getting asked in for interviews, compared to applicants with Anglo-Saxon names whose chances exceeded one-in-three.

According to their study, a Chinese-named applicant would need to put in 68 per cent more applications than an Anglo-named applicant to get the same number of calls back.

A Middle Eastern-named applicant needed 64 per cent more, an indigenous-named applicant 35 per cent more and an Italian-named applicant 12 per cent more.

But they said the results varied from city to city.

Sydney employers were generally more discriminatory than those in Melbourne or Brisbane, except when it came to indigenous names, where they were more accepting.

But only in Melbourne was there a type of non-Anglo name that was actually loved. Melbourne employers were 7 per cent more likely to respond well to someone with an Italian name than they were to an Anglo name.

Asked whether the study had found that Australian employers were racist, Dr. Leigh said it was clear they discriminated on the basis of the racial origin of applicants' names.

"There is no other reasonable interpretation of our results," he said. (ANI)