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Muslim names harm job chances
Muslim names harm job chances
Job applicants from minority communities, particularly Muslims, are still suffering widespread and overt discrimination from virtually every sector of the market, according to investigators.
Research into jobs advertised in commerce, sales, the media and leisure found that candidates with English-sounding names were nearly three times as likely to get an interview as those with names indicating that they might be Muslim. Applicants with names indicating they might be black Africans were half as likely to gain an interview as those with English names.
Investigators from BBC Radio Five Live sent off carefully-worded job applications using six fictitious names for 50 jobs.
These were sent to a variety of employers who had placed advertisements in newspapers and on recruitment websites.
The applications, submitted over a year, were written so as to ensure all the candidates appeared to have comparable qualifications and experience.
The jobs were in various parts of the country, as were the addresses given.
Researchers found that the white candidates - John Andrews and Jenny Hughes - were successful in getting interviews 23% of the time while the black African applicants - Abu Olasemi and Yinka Olatunde - had a 13% success rate. For Fatima Khan and Nasser Hanif, the Muslim candidates, the success rate was just 9%.
The general secretary of the TUC, Brendan Barber, called on the government to introduce new race regulation in the jobs market.
"Statistics as shocking as these suggest that many people recruiting for private-sector firms are harbouring inherently racist views," he said.
The research mirrored an exercise in the US last year where researchers from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found US managers seemed to discriminate on the basis of names.
Shahistra Zamir, 21, a law graduate, says the same phenomenon plagues Muslims here. "I have been applying for placements and I find, along with many other people I know, that we have to write a lot more applications than other people simply to get the same result."
In some respects, the research is dispiriting for all jobseekers. Of the 294 applications, 183 received no reply at all.
· Do ethnic minorities get a raw deal in the workplace? Today on BBC Radio Five Live and BBC Asian Network.
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Originally Posted by Manifest Destiny
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