Bertrand and Mullainathan made a big splash back in 2004 when they asked “Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” In a fascinating paper, they sent out resumes with “black names” or “white names” and then found that the resumes with the white names were more likely to get a call-back.
Samantha Friedman, one of my professors at Albany, is working on a similar project now. She’s asking ”Is Neil a more desirable tenant than Tyrone and Jorge?” In this study, they are looking at online ads for apartment rentals and seeing what kind of responses they get. My guess is that they will get results similar to the job discrimination study.
I stumbled upon a really interesting – and total unscientific - study on the effects of race on dating website responses. The nerds at OkCupid! took the time to break down the response rates of their users by all sorts of different demographic characteristics. They found all sorts of racial discrimination from all races and genders. A whole lot.
My sociologically-inclined brain almost exploded thinking about the endless number of questions that followed. There’s race relations and then there’s race relations. The first two forms of discrimination are illegal while the third is still legal. Why is this? While most people might see something immoral about not dating a person solely because of their race, I doubt they would want to make a law banning people from making that choice. The rise of commercial internet dating sites raises an interesting problem though. Could dating sites become liable for facilitating racial discrimination? A federal court has held that Craigslist is not liable for racially discriminatory content posted by users. Will this hold?
And what does it say when everyone is discriminating against certain races (including their own in some cases)? Peter Blau once remarked “You can’t marry an eskimo when there’s no eskimo around,” but what if online dating sites allow people to indulge in their taste for eskimos (and discriminate against everyone else)?
Man, I wish I had access to more data like this. Imagine all the killer papers that could come out of it!
- Josh McCabe
People tend to prefer to date within their race, especially women:
http://www.slate.com/id/2177637/nav/tap3/
Following the results of this project, people may put discrimination into its proper place – something that’s an inescapable human phenomenon.
This sounds like a good paper topic Josh.
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In another variation on a theme, at Seeking Arrangement the Sugar Daddies and Mommies can registera given address while they login from a different global zone but the sugarbabies and boys are banned from the site for this due to ‘security policy’. Is this discriminatory?