Daryl Ho Sheng Hui, Hong Yan Qing, Tan Jia Hui, Chew Soon Beng

Abstract: We investigated the presence and extent of name and gender discrimination by Singaporean employers through an audit study, where we generated fictitious resumes of Western and Asian sounding names, with equal representation of male and female, high quality and low quality categories. This paper serves as the pioneer audit study on name and gender discrimination in Singapore, where only gender discrimination has been sparingly explored by previous researchers. A total of 2,200 resumes were sent out to nine occupations over three months, where employer callbacks were recorded. We found that employers generally preferred Western name applicants to Asian name applicants, where name and resume quality affect the likelihood of callback. The Average Marginal Effects (AMEs) of Grade Point Average (GPA) and relevant internship have the most significant effect on probability of callback for all resumes.

Key words: name discrimination; gender discrimination; Singaporean employers