It's actually worst than I made out in the title. The responses he got under his original name were "almost all negative", not actual invitations. While almost all the response under his pseudonym were positive, some getting out of their way to pull him in.
It's actually worse still. ALL of the 17 responses to the real name were negative if you read what he actually posted. That's an infinite increase. NOT 5x.
Sure, we can give the benefit of the doubt that most were unconscious about it. But the scale of difference in the response rate means that we also can't rule out that there were a minority who rejected him because they are basically racist.
It's also a hell lot more fun if you're Arab and atheist esp if you carry a religious name, you will be targeted all the time, and try to explain yourself and the associations that you might have with your background culture/religion.
That's not a "good example of unconscious bias". Unless there's something else going on here (one or both of the names used in the experiment had some sort of reputation in the community already, or some other aspects of the CV were changed in the experiment), this is an absolutely stunning result and evidence of very conscious bigotry. This is a Black person applying for a job in 1920s Atlanta kind of result. In 2022 academia!
Being names Mohammed is like being named Jesus, it is directly tied to the religion. I suspect a person named Jesus from Texas would have a hard time getting into biology research programs as well.
Of all the criteria to evaluate someone by, "the label their parents gave them when they were born, which they had zero choice over" is pretty a silly one.
(edit: and more to the point, a lot of common English names tie back to conservative bible types, but it's just so commonplace we don't think twice about it... the same with the Mohammeds and Jesuses of their cultures, they only look foreign when they're in our context)
Basically only religious persons names their kids Mohammed, those who quit the religion will not put the burden of that name on their kids. I suspect the same thing about Jesus even in the Spanish world, Christianity is very popular in the Spanish world as well.
But to be fair I have met way more Muslims than I have met Christians so I am not as sure about it, but Mohammed is for sure a religious name meaning they had religious parents.
Let's assume that's true (that some "religious" names are more religious than others). All that really tells you is that such a such person was given the name by a religious parent, or from a culture where religiosity is the norm. It doesn't tell you about that person's own religiosity, whether they had to struggle with it growing up, how much of it they wanted to keep when they started school or work in the West, how their views might have changed after several years/decades of that, how much they hated their parents for naming them Mohammed...
Or how well they work with people from different religious backgrounds because they know what it's like to be discriminated against at a glance, or how they avoid religious political and religious discussions at work because it triggers WASP-y types when all they really want to do is escape oppression in their home country and feed their family without bothering anyone, or maybe, you know, they're just reasonable enough to understand that religions are deeply personal and subjective things that no two large groups of people will ever entirely agree on anywhere, and so choose to show tolerance even where there are disagreements.
For sure there are evil wife-beating, woman-hating Muslims out there... just the same way there are evil wife-beating, woman-hating Christians out there. And maybe some sects of Islam haven't had the same humanist interventions that modern western Protestants have seen, the same way there are conservative Jewish or Buddhist sects just the same as there are gay-loving, trans-affirming Catholic sects. The point is, you can't really know all of that just by looking at someone's given name. They didn't earn it, they didn't choose it, they may or may not have lived up their parents' expectations of it.
It's one thing if you look at their CV and see they went to a theology school and all their previous employers were religious institutions. It's another thing to just assume ahead of time that this person is different -- and not only different, but inherently incompatible (even unredeemable) -- just because of their name. Give people a chance, man...
> Basically only religious persons names their kids Mohammed, those who quit the religion will not put the burden of that name on their kids.
That might hold true for first names (even though I am not entirely sure), but when it comes to last names, it is a complete crapshoot.
I changed my last name when I was 14 (entirely for unrelated reasons), but the old one I had contained a form of "Mohammed" in it. Without giving it away, I will just say that some popular MMA fighters these days have different forms of the same last name as mine used to be.
My mom's side of the family is religious, but they are eastern orthodox christian. My dad's side (from which I inherited my old last name) is entirely atheist, but it just so happened that at some point in time about 4-5 generations ago, there were ancestors on his side who were religious muslims.
And given that in my old country the last names of children are always automatically taken from the father (barring rare exceptions), it ended up propagating 4-5 generations down with no actually religious people in the loop at all. What makes it even more bizarre to people irl who know this is that my dad has that "blond hair blue eyes" look.
It wouldn't disqualify the person, but since everyone in research has way more applications than they have positions they just select those who are statistically less likely to clash culturally.
Nowhere did I say that this behaviour should be "celebrated, condoned or dealt with in a business as usual manner".
Explaining why racism and bias can be rational doesn't mean that I condone racism or bias. Its similar to how companies avoid women who are around 30 because they are likely to get pregnant, that is rational but still isn't something we should celebrate or condone.
I didn't say that you necessarily or explicitly endorse this position but your comment unfortunately came cross as forgiving of this practice.
Also, I don't see how this behavior can be viewed as rational since we're talking about a research institution here that's supposed to be concerned with scientific excellence hiring the best regardless of their background, and not some road trip with your buddies where you get to pick and choose who will be invited to join you.
I see no rationality in this behavior at all, just outright bias and discrimination.
I could say the same for southerners and Christians my friend. It’s not fair to treat individuals like they all conform to whatever you think their home culture is, though. I personally know several southerners and Christians who aren’t dickheads, for example.
100% agreed. Would be interesting to see how an application by Muhammad with a Penn State degree compares to a John with an Oral Robert’s degree when applying to a neutral institution.
Before a knee jerk response of unconscious bias, which I’m in no way denying, it is more important to know how this research was conducted. What about the publications and references? It’s not like the job is flipping burgers - postdoctoral positions are extremely specific and people tend to know each other within a couple of hops on their social network.
Wouldn't that in all cases benefit the real CV over the fake one? (because if you started to look up the fake person you'd find less useful results than for the real name, which would turn up real publications)
I wouldn't say that all postdocs are extremely specific in a field like plant biology. You might require the postdoc to be knowledgable of certain lab practices only for example.
In fact, in many cases it is very unlikely that you will find a postdoc that has done work in a cutting-edge niche area that a professor is interested in, so the pool of candidates even globally is not sufficient. Your best hope is to find a postdoc in an adjacent area who you can train up on what you are doing.
Indeed it is not a rigours experiment by any stretch of the imagination. But the difference in scale in response (and the fact his profile looks earnest) we have an interesting data point on bias in academia.
At the stage of shortlisting for the interview, a lot of people don't actually go out and check the paper, they just register it is published in a good journal, they might do a deep dive when preparing for the interview if at all.
Especially in a field like plant biology, papers probably have many authors, so even if you check the paper you might not pay attention to the author list (or he could have chosen a name that looks like one of the co-authors in some of his papers?)
Provided that someone has actually read his educational history. It's more likely the reading has stopped at "From: Muhammad Abdullah". And I'm trying to find the likeliest explanation of the phenomenon other than the 'omnipresent racism' theory. Please don't accuse people of thought crimes without a sufficient basis.
There was a similar post a few days ago where someone did this but instead of changing their name they changed their gender (female names got significantly more responses).
That post got flagged and this post is in the frontpage.
Interesting.
> Is it still racist? Or is it just unfair stereotyping?
Many stereotypes are based on reality. But just because X population is Y% more likely to do Z, doesn't make it fair to extrapolate this to individuals, and doesn't make it less racist.
Not commenting on that post because I didn’t see it but just noting. Some people support affirmative action. There are arguments that can be used that are somewhat convincing. Correcting generational feedback loops is hard and may require more than just blind indifference. Personally I think affirmative action can go too far, but it is very much a live issue in politics for good reason. Meanwhile there aren’t many who would say discrimination against people from the Middle East is good
Well, there's a difference between supporting something, and trying to actively shut down any discussion revealing arguments against it.
The best solutions are always compromises born in debates between disagreeing sides. With one side endlessly silencing anything that doesn't go with their narrative, we won't see that happening anymore.
> Meanwhile there aren’t many who would say discrimination against
> people from the Middle East is good
You assumed that the poster was from the Middle East by the name Mohammed. But his name, accounting for spelling variations, is the most popular male name in Britain for well over a decade.
In addition to what pseudalopex said I was figuring the thing to think about was what the people evaluating him would assume, not anything true or false about him. Just like say a trans man may still experience sexism aimed at women
In general, I do not think flagged posts get removed (I have access to multiple such posts). But they probably are not listed in the search indices, only available with a direct link (e.g. from your comment history if you commented there).
It's a little suspect that this reddit post from 5 days ago is almost the same as the linked tweet, but the premise is kind of switched up.
23 hours ago from the linked Twitter: "So I did an experiment, I am looking for a postdoctoral position and decided to check to what extent racism in science could be. I took my CV and changed the name to a more western one. I'd send it out with my real name, then a few days later (or before) with the western name."
5 days ago on this linked Reddit: "So I did an experiment, I work in CS and decided to test what gender bias is. So I took my CV and changed the name to a female name. I'd send it out with my real name, then a few days later (or a few days before) with a female name."
I haven't flagged either that post or this one, but I understand why people do. Both present useless anecdotes that tell us nothing about whether or not a systemic problem exists.
This only leads to resentment and a reinforcement of the idea that women have it on 'easy mode', which I don't think is caused by them in the first place.
One day I went to interview at SiB (https://www.sib.swiss/) as part of a cohort of 20 shortlisted from all over the world. Women on our cohort were treated significantly better, with a couple weird professors were behind them all the time. Everyone noticed that (even other girls) and we actually, explicitly, touched on that subject on our free time.
I recall there was one dinner by the end of that trip and these guys made one particular girl sit in between them, which was kind of awkward as students were all sitting together in a different part of the table. One of these guys was all over the girl, to clarify: not touching her, but physically very close all the time and asking a lot of trivial questions one after the other (do you like food XXXX? have you been to XXXX? what do you think of XXXX?), the girl was visibly uncomfortable but what was she supposed to do? We were all about 20yo at that time, at that age (also a newgrad) you just go with the flow. Plenty of people take advantage of that.
Not implying anything but, as anecdata, that girl got accepted into the program under the supervision of that particular guy. I hope she had a comfortable PhD stay and I mean that with all honesty.
How do you get rid of unconscious bias? I am assuming this wasn't malicious and they don't have a 'no foreign sounding names' qualification that they are filtering by, but our brain is a pattern matching machine and if an industry has an overwhelming number of one race/gender/orientation/whatever won't the brain just naturally bias towards that? Even though individuals say they would never be biased, the subconscious element of it seems inevitable.
Cynical question: are there 200+ post doc positions for someone to apply to at one point where their experience and publications are actually relevant?
How many positions is "on the differentiation of the leaf morpho-physiological traits between native and non-native plants on a Mediterranean island (Mallorca)" actually relevant to?
I work in finance, everyone i deal with who is Chinese has 2 names, a local one and an English one.
So you talk to people, they are introduced to westerners like me as James or Susan. Then you find out they are actually Bai Zhang but they are (understandably) tired of spelling it, getting it mis-pronounced or getting called Zhang Bai or similar.
I always thought that was very sensible.
I wonder if I should do the same? I would if I moved there.
I visited Taiwan once and I was amused that several people were introduced to me as "Bob Wang" and "Jason Hsu" and such. Which I very much appreciate because I'm very bad at the tones, I especially can't do that downy-uppy one to save my life.
I’ve had coworkers with Muslim-sounding names before and casual work conversation was about the same. It’s not like we usually sit around discussing religious doctrine.
Maybe you wanted an outlet to air your grievances or vent your frustration with past experiences that you might have had with individuals from the Muslim community, which is totally understandable, but still my argument holds true and you're painting with a broad brush here.
an approach, but most things we consider racism from the 1960s and before had an economic rationale or a social rationale, many of the people who normalized it at the time also didn't feel actual disdain in their hearts and yet we now call many of those things racist and have modified
This concern should have been addressed, if it really materially affects performance on the team, and this is a big IF, in the dreaded cultural fit part of the interview and not like that where they openly discriminate against him because of his religious background.
This sounds like it might be the "culture fit" rationale that interviewers have in mind when doing things that are really unfair to individuals (and, IIUC, in many cases illegal in the US).
Besides being unfair, it can also be otherwise bad for the organization. In tech startups, we talk about innovation and ideas, and one of the places that comes from is combining knowledge from different backgrounds (in multiple senses). If a startup started with two people who then only hired people like themselves, they're restricting the likelihood of good ideas that they wouldn't have thought of themselves.
A lot of people are debating if this post is legit. I can't make any definite statements, but an 87% response rate for any job application is extremely high.
The crazy thing is he says 54 people were willing to accept a fellowship from his Western name. How does that work, exactly? In his application he communicates that he also has a fellowship available that he could give to the people he is applying to? It doesn't make sense to me.
I don't believe it. The change in response rate is far too large and in the opposite direction I would expect. It goes from "0 accept Mohammed" to "54% would accept a fellowship from Michael". I could not imagine a dumber result.
"The results themselves were not surprising to me. I was more surprised to encounter harassment from researchers constantly advocating for equality, inclusion, and diversity."
I suppose this is a question of what do we value more? The independence of researchers to run their own show and hire who they want, or trying to make the academic playing field level for all?
I don't mean to discredit the author of the tweet, but it's not a good idea to become outraged because of tweets that have no proof and no known methodology for their study.
>You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets.
From the comments here I can picture what the tweet was about, but considering how quickly it was made private I would be wary of trusting it too much.
Not a professor, but I used to be a lecturer and I still get some spam looking email application from foreign students. I am sure this is detrimental to real applicant.
When I asked the author of the viral thread, he said he took the wording directly from a reddit thread a few days ago, then deleted his acknowledgment, hid my question, and locked down further replies within minutes. Something is very off about this story. https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/15716306207442452...
He nuked his account from orbit after confirming he copied from a reddit thread in response to closer scrutiny. Without extensive documentation of a sort that seems unlikely now, it seems best to treat this whole story as a fabrication.
This makes no sense. If you change your name you loose all papers and citations in Google Scholar and other academic networks for example. It’s not an easy fix. Everyone looks at google scholar stats before interviewing.
121 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadFake things always get greedy
A lot of fun, I tell you!
Islamic name: 100 samples, 17 responses, 0 positive.
That's not a "good example of unconscious bias". Unless there's something else going on here (one or both of the names used in the experiment had some sort of reputation in the community already, or some other aspects of the CV were changed in the experiment), this is an absolutely stunning result and evidence of very conscious bigotry. This is a Black person applying for a job in 1920s Atlanta kind of result. In 2022 academia!
Of all the criteria to evaluate someone by, "the label their parents gave them when they were born, which they had zero choice over" is pretty a silly one.
(edit: and more to the point, a lot of common English names tie back to conservative bible types, but it's just so commonplace we don't think twice about it... the same with the Mohammeds and Jesuses of their cultures, they only look foreign when they're in our context)
But to be fair I have met way more Muslims than I have met Christians so I am not as sure about it, but Mohammed is for sure a religious name meaning they had religious parents.
Or how well they work with people from different religious backgrounds because they know what it's like to be discriminated against at a glance, or how they avoid religious political and religious discussions at work because it triggers WASP-y types when all they really want to do is escape oppression in their home country and feed their family without bothering anyone, or maybe, you know, they're just reasonable enough to understand that religions are deeply personal and subjective things that no two large groups of people will ever entirely agree on anywhere, and so choose to show tolerance even where there are disagreements.
For sure there are evil wife-beating, woman-hating Muslims out there... just the same way there are evil wife-beating, woman-hating Christians out there. And maybe some sects of Islam haven't had the same humanist interventions that modern western Protestants have seen, the same way there are conservative Jewish or Buddhist sects just the same as there are gay-loving, trans-affirming Catholic sects. The point is, you can't really know all of that just by looking at someone's given name. They didn't earn it, they didn't choose it, they may or may not have lived up their parents' expectations of it.
It's one thing if you look at their CV and see they went to a theology school and all their previous employers were religious institutions. It's another thing to just assume ahead of time that this person is different -- and not only different, but inherently incompatible (even unredeemable) -- just because of their name. Give people a chance, man...
That might hold true for first names (even though I am not entirely sure), but when it comes to last names, it is a complete crapshoot.
I changed my last name when I was 14 (entirely for unrelated reasons), but the old one I had contained a form of "Mohammed" in it. Without giving it away, I will just say that some popular MMA fighters these days have different forms of the same last name as mine used to be.
My mom's side of the family is religious, but they are eastern orthodox christian. My dad's side (from which I inherited my old last name) is entirely atheist, but it just so happened that at some point in time about 4-5 generations ago, there were ancestors on his side who were religious muslims.
And given that in my old country the last names of children are always automatically taken from the father (barring rare exceptions), it ended up propagating 4-5 generations down with no actually religious people in the loop at all. What makes it even more bizarre to people irl who know this is that my dad has that "blond hair blue eyes" look.
Explaining why racism and bias can be rational doesn't mean that I condone racism or bias. Its similar to how companies avoid women who are around 30 because they are likely to get pregnant, that is rational but still isn't something we should celebrate or condone.
Also, I don't see how this behavior can be viewed as rational since we're talking about a research institution here that's supposed to be concerned with scientific excellence hiring the best regardless of their background, and not some road trip with your buddies where you get to pick and choose who will be invited to join you.
I see no rationality in this behavior at all, just outright bias and discrimination.
You’d find more information on the real person.
But the news might be bad.
In fact, in many cases it is very unlikely that you will find a postdoc that has done work in a cutting-edge niche area that a professor is interested in, so the pool of candidates even globally is not sufficient. Your best hope is to find a postdoc in an adjacent area who you can train up on what you are doing.
Especially in a field like plant biology, papers probably have many authors, so even if you check the paper you might not pay attention to the author list (or he could have chosen a name that looks like one of the co-authors in some of his papers?)
Please don't try to justify discrimination based on color or national origin. It is, in fact, against the law.
Provided that someone has actually read his educational history. It's more likely the reading has stopped at "From: Muhammad Abdullah". And I'm trying to find the likeliest explanation of the phenomenon other than the 'omnipresent racism' theory. Please don't accuse people of thought crimes without a sufficient basis.
> It's more likely the reading has stopped at "From: Muhammad Abdullah"
That's called racism.
> Please don't accuse people of thought crimes without a sufficient basis.
It's not thought crime. Employment opportunities are being denied. There are specific laws against this.
I hope you never end up being a hiring manager. You are a huge liability to any organization.
It's called national origin discrimination (If I'm correct that is)
>You are a huge liability to any organization.
So you are one of those that confuse "something unfortunate happens" with "something should happen in this unfortunate way". Ok.
Many stereotypes are based on reality. But just because X population is Y% more likely to do Z, doesn't make it fair to extrapolate this to individuals, and doesn't make it less racist.
The best solutions are always compromises born in debates between disagreeing sides. With one side endlessly silencing anything that doesn't go with their narrative, we won't see that happening anymore.
His Twitter profile said immigrant and had the flag of Lebanon after.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32823355
Those articles are not [dead] but the algorithm penalizes them when ranking the front page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32880510
As the comments show, the submission had other issues.
23 hours ago from the linked Twitter: "So I did an experiment, I am looking for a postdoctoral position and decided to check to what extent racism in science could be. I took my CV and changed the name to a more western one. I'd send it out with my real name, then a few days later (or before) with the western name."
5 days ago on this linked Reddit: "So I did an experiment, I work in CS and decided to test what gender bias is. So I took my CV and changed the name to a female name. I'd send it out with my real name, then a few days later (or a few days before) with a female name."
This only leads to resentment and a reinforcement of the idea that women have it on 'easy mode', which I don't think is caused by them in the first place.
One day I went to interview at SiB (https://www.sib.swiss/) as part of a cohort of 20 shortlisted from all over the world. Women on our cohort were treated significantly better, with a couple weird professors were behind them all the time. Everyone noticed that (even other girls) and we actually, explicitly, touched on that subject on our free time.
I recall there was one dinner by the end of that trip and these guys made one particular girl sit in between them, which was kind of awkward as students were all sitting together in a different part of the table. One of these guys was all over the girl, to clarify: not touching her, but physically very close all the time and asking a lot of trivial questions one after the other (do you like food XXXX? have you been to XXXX? what do you think of XXXX?), the girl was visibly uncomfortable but what was she supposed to do? We were all about 20yo at that time, at that age (also a newgrad) you just go with the flow. Plenty of people take advantage of that.
Not implying anything but, as anecdata, that girl got accepted into the program under the supervision of that particular guy. I hope she had a comfortable PhD stay and I mean that with all honesty.
How many positions is "on the differentiation of the leaf morpho-physiological traits between native and non-native plants on a Mediterranean island (Mallorca)" actually relevant to?
So you talk to people, they are introduced to westerners like me as James or Susan. Then you find out they are actually Bai Zhang but they are (understandably) tired of spelling it, getting it mis-pronounced or getting called Zhang Bai or similar.
I always thought that was very sensible.
I wonder if I should do the same? I would if I moved there.
I wouldn't even know where to begin having a conversation with such a thing.
Maybe you wanted an outlet to air your grievances or vent your frustration with past experiences that you might have had with individuals from the Muslim community, which is totally understandable, but still my argument holds true and you're painting with a broad brush here.
so its just not an excuse
This concern should have been addressed, if it really materially affects performance on the team, and this is a big IF, in the dreaded cultural fit part of the interview and not like that where they openly discriminate against him because of his religious background.
Besides being unfair, it can also be otherwise bad for the organization. In tech startups, we talk about innovation and ideas, and one of the places that comes from is combining knowledge from different backgrounds (in multiple senses). If a startup started with two people who then only hired people like themselves, they're restricting the likelihood of good ideas that they wouldn't have thought of themselves.
If he's holding it high
He's telling a lie
From the comments here I can picture what the tweet was about, but considering how quickly it was made private I would be wary of trusting it too much.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220918142648/https://twitter.c...
He nuked his account from orbit after confirming he copied from a reddit thread in response to closer scrutiny. Without extensive documentation of a sort that seems unlikely now, it seems best to treat this whole story as a fabrication.