(Photo by Travis Wise, CC-BY-2.0)
Recently we shared a story about the rise of unique baby names in America over the course of the last few decades. A new study reveals that those same unique and hard-to-pronounce names might have an impact on job callbacks. The Wall Street Journal reports on the study of 1,500 economics PhD’s looking for academic, government, and private sector jobs, and concludes:
“Overall, people with complex names had a 10% lower chance of getting an academic job—generally the most desirable for economics Ph.D. candidates—over the next year. But there was a big split within those results. For candidates from top-ranked doctoral programs, having a complex name only decreased their chance of placing in an academic job by 5%, but for those coming from lower-ranked Ph.D. programs, a complex name decreased their chance by 12%. In other words, the penalty is small for those coming from top programs, but it is large for those coming from lesser ranked programs, Dr. Wu says.”
Read more in The Wall Street Journal.