Are Australian employers racist?

A new study has revealed that people with foreign or indigenous-sounding name have less chance of landing a job in Australia [ Images ].

However, applicants with Italian sounding name or if they are Melbourne-based, have an advantage.

The study was undertaken by Australian National University researchers Alison Booth, Andrew Leigh and Elena Vargonova who 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.

The study revealed that applicants with Chinese names were the least preferred having only a one-in-five chance of getting interview calls compared to applicants with Anglo-Saxon names whose chances exceeded one-in-three.

Typically 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 and 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, the study published in The Age said.

However, the results varied from city to city.

Taking a comparison of other cities the study said, Sydney [ Images ] employers were generally more discriminatory than those in Melbourne [ Images ] or Brisbane [ Images ], except when it came to indigenous names, where they were more accepting.

Melbourne employers were seven per cent more likely to respond well to someone with an Italian name than they were to an Anglo name, it said.

Leigh pointed out that the 7 per cent bias in favour of Italian-sounding names was not statistically significant. "But what it does allow you to say is that there is no statistically discernible discrimination against Italian names in Melbourne. They are as well-regarded as Anglo names. This could be because Melbourne has a higher share of Italians than other Australian cities, and has had for a long time. Discrimination tends to be higher when you have a recent influx of arrivals, as Sydney has from China and the Middle East," Leigh said.

"Or it could be because many of the jobs we pretended to apply for were waiter and waitress positions in bistros, bars, cafes and restaurants," he added.

On the query if the study found that Australian employers were racist, 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. The fake applications had made clear that the supposed job-seekers had completed secondary schooling in Australia, making it unlikely that the employers had assumed the non-Anglo applicants could not speak English.