Moreover, using census results ignores exposure to foreigners with these names. My own strongest association for "Thompson" is the white police officers in Tintin, and more generally for white English people. (Although I'm British so that may not be representative.)
As long as "low class" black names are more readily associated with blackness than "high class" ones, this methodology isn't really isolating anything, just doing a slightly more intersectional analysis.
> For example, based on data from the United States Census, 90 and 75 percent of individuals with Washington and Jefferson surnames are African American, respectively. Similarly, 90 percent of individuals with a surname of either Hernandez or Garcia are Hispanic, and 70 percent of Andersons and Thompsons are white.
I would still question the validity of this approach, and more generally, I don't think you can meaningfully isolate class and race, since they're so inter-related in the US.
They acknowledge that the names may not be strong signals, but the very reason that's the case is that people are less likely to associate black people with high socioeconomic status in the first place.
Honestly, I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole here. You started by claiming that there was a massive gender & race bias:
> CVs/books sent around with just the name/gender changed and the huge difference in response rate to see the bias.
When I corrected that and linked to a study, you replied with an argument based on a misreading. When I corrected your misreading, you fell back to, "I don't think you can meaningfully isolate class and race, since they're so inter-related in the US." If that's the case, then it also refutes the conclusions of the original (flawed) studies claiming racism. After all, if your argument is true, those can be just as easily explained as classism.
I'm not sure there is anything that could convince you that you are mistaken.
People are being unfairly judged based on racial and class identifiers, rather than on their CV.
That's not true. The original studies used low class names for blacks and hispanics, but not for whites. (For example, they didn't use names like Cletus or Billy Ray.) Once this was corrected for, they found almost no bias in resume screening.[1]
1. https://economics.missouri.edu/working-papers/2014/wp1419_ko...