Throughout Shuki Khalili’s career, he suspected his name might be holding him back. When he worked for a Wall Street headhunter, he felt potential clients would blow him off when they heard his name. When he started his own business selling greeting cards, phones sales were initially a bust at first.
“I tried using an American name, ‘Andrew Warner,’ and suddenly I could at least engage them in conversation and sell them some ads so I could build my business,” he said. He now goes by Andrew Warner and runs a successful entrepreneurial resource site called Mixergy.com in Santa Monica, Calif.
Like it or not, your name can make a difference in how seriously you are taken at work and whether you even get your foot in the door for the interview.
One study by researchers at MIT and the University of Chicago found that job applicants with names that sounded African-American got short shrift when it came to the hiring process. The researchers sent out 5,000 fake resumes, and it turned out that resumes with names such as Tyrone and Tamika were less likely to get calls from prospective employers than their Anglo-sounding counterparts, and qualifications seemed to have little impact.
For Larry Whitten, owner of the Whitten Hotel in Taos, N.M., names mattered so much that he ordered a group of Hispanic employees change their names to sound more Anglo Saxon. For example, changing Martin (pronounced Mar-TEEN) to plain-old Martin or Marco to Mark.
At the Taos hotel, Whitten explained, when some workers answered the phones and said their names, customers didn’t understand what they were saying. For example, Mar-TEEN, sounded like “my thing,” he said.
“I am not a racist,” said Whitten, who fired several employees for insubordination. What motivated his decisions, he stressed, was the bottom line.
“I’m not accustomed to Spanish lingo. A lot of people have the same thing,” he said. “If a name is going to prevent me from getting a guest because they hang up or can’t understand it or they get frustrated, I have to do something about it.”
He said he had operated a hotel in Oklahoma where 99 percent of his employees were African American and did a similar thing. “I changed five or six names without any trouble there,” he said. “Latasha to Tasha, to make it easy.”
What’s in a name
Indeed, it’s what people don’t know or understand that is sometimes at the heart of prejudice. And catering to such ignorance is no excuse for workplace discrimination, experts stressed.
“Customer preferences and co-worker preferences are never something that can justify discrimination,” said Ernest Haffner, senior attorney adviser at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
“Changing somebody’s name is something that could be viewed as intentionally discriminatory or not but it still could have a disparate impact” on a certain group of workers, said Haffner, who would not comment directly on the New Mexico hotel workers’ situation because he did not know the details. “If the employer feels people are uncomfortable with workers that have foreign-sounding names, then the employer is adopting the biases of the customers or co-workers.”
If, however, the employer has some legitimate business reason for asking a worker to change his or her name, he said, and is not only singling out one group, then that may be a different story.
Full disclosure here: My own family, Greek immigrants from Istanbul, has grappled with the name issue for years.
My grandfather, whose first name was Soukias, worked in a New York textile factory and was told by his boss when he started: “Your name is now Joe.” Also, my sister, an attorney in Virginia, changed her name to Tahmin from Tahmincioglu because an employer told her to pick a name that sounded more American. And more than one editor has asked me if I used my whole name on a byline.
I chose to keep my last name, but my real first name is Evanthia. I go by Eve professionally.
Issue of perception
Tammy Kabell, a resume consultant, has often seen how names are perceived in her line of work. “I’ve had frank discussions with HR managers and hiring mangers in the corporate world, and they tell me when they see a name that’s ethnic or a black name, they perceive that person as having low education or coming from a lower socioeconomic class,” she said.
And it’s only gotten worse during the recession, she added. “At 10 percent unemployment, they’re going through a lot of resumes, so they can be selective of who they call.”
Following Sept. 11, 2001, she noticed a particular bias against Muslim/Arab sounding names. One particular client who was an electrical engineer was from Pakistan and named Raheem. “He looked for a year and a half and couldn’t get anything,” she explained, adding that he could only find a job as a supervisor of a cleaning staff at a Miami hotel.
So how do you know if your name is holding you back?
One site, BehindTheName.com, actually provides feedback from readers on how a host of names from all different cultures and ethic groups are perceived.
John, for example, was seen by those polled as largely “wholesome,” while Juan was rated higher when it came to being “devious.” And as far as the “strange” rating on the two names — 44 percent thought John was strange, while nearly 70 percent thought Juan was strange.
Bruce Lansky, the author of “100,000 Plus Baby Names,” is convinced a name could potentially make or break a child’s future career.
“Most people in America are not bigoted, but they do have comfort zones,” he said. “If you’re picking a name for your child, it’s reasonable to select a name that reflects your ethnicity but which will strike most people as ‘familiar’ or ‘mainstream’ rather than ‘foreign’ or ‘off-putting.’”
In search of the mainstream
HR managers, he said, tend to seek out applicants they feel are “familiar” or “mainstream.” “A foreign-sounding or highly ethnic-sounding name will have people wondering if they spoke English in the household, or if they’ll be able to get along and mix with Americans.”
He suggested finding names that are part of your culture or ethnicity but are not too overt. For example, he said, “if you’re Irish, you could choose Kevin or Shawn, instead of Dermott or Shamus.”
Or use an Anglo-sounding name as the middle name, he noted, giving a child a choice on what to use when they get older. “It can be Abdullah and his middle name can be Henry,” he said.
Dennis W. Montoya, the lawyer representing eight of the fired employees from Whitten’s Taos hotel, doesn’t buy the whole change-your-name-to-conform argument.
“At one point in time, it was society’s preference not to allow African Americans to sit at the front of the bus,” he pointed out. “If we continued to cater to societal preferences, we’d still be living in those days.”
The fired workers, Montoya said, objected to being told they had to change their Hispanic given names because of a “value judgment imposed by the employer.”
Montoya said the EEOC is investigating the Whitten case. An EEOC official said the agency is “prohibited by law from confirming or denying any investigations.”
The hope is that the situation can be resolved through mediation, Montoya said. “If this is not resolved through negotiations, then the case will proceed to a trial by jury,” he added.
Eve Tahmincioglu writes the weekly “Your Career” column for msnbc.com and chronicles workplace issues in her blog, CareerDiva.net.
“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”
- Henry David Thoreau
By Anthony Spadafore
According to the latest research, if you don’t like your job it could be because your friends’ behavior is rubbing off on you. The new social science of “social contagion” is revealing that the choices we make about our bodies, health, career and even our politics can be strongly influenced by our friends.
A recent article in the New York Times Magazine by Clive Thompson, Is Happiness Catching?, highlights the current research into the human phenomenon of social contagion. The researchers, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler analyzed 50 years of health data, meticulously combing relationships that spanned three generations to map out how friends and family affect each other’s health. Their findings have knocked the socks off of public health scientists. It appears that our friends’ bad behaviors are influencing us much more than we know. Thompson writes, “Clusters of friends appeared to ‘infect’ each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking.” “Groups of people would become obese together, while other groupings would remain slender or even lose weight.”
These unseen social forces are also influencing the careers we choose. Before the big banks failed last year, landing a high-paying job on Wall Street was a super contagion. So many Harvard grads got infected that the president of the university made a passionate plea in her commencement speech warning students to wake up from the spell. This dilemma is partly fueled by how little college-bound students know about their own natural talents. They are like a boat without a ruder; they’ll float in the direction of the social tide. If a young person doesn’t know what they’re best at, they won’t have enough guts or conviction to resist the socially “approved” career trends and take a stand for something else. In an msnbc.com article by Gayle B. Ronan, College freshmen face major dilemma, she writes “Eighty percent of college-bound students have yet to choose a major, according to Dr. Fritz Grupe, founder of MyMajors.com. But they are still expected to pick schools, apply to and start degree programs without knowing where they want to end up. Fifty percent of those who do declare a major, change majors – with many doing so two or three times during their college years.” College students want to succeed, but without accurate self knowledge to guide their decisions, survival instincts take over. Going after the “hot” career feels like the right thing to do because “following the tribe” is a hard-wired, automatic instinct. On top of this biological imperative, praise from parents and teachers further nudges students toward doing socially accepted careers. It’s practically impossible for someone to resist being herded off this cliff.
The bottom line conclusion is that some of our happiness is relative to how socially “normal” we feel in comparison to people around us. Although our cooperative nature was a evolutionary advantage for our ancient ancestors, it is hoodwinking us into making hasty life choices. The result is that at least 70 percent of college-educated people are falling into careers that don’t fit what they do best. This widespread career mismatch is camouflaged with the youthful drive and enthusiasm that lasts about a decade after college. When people reach mid-thirties something shifts, they’re not happy and realize they’ve been heading fast down the wrong road. One of my clients, a neurologist, spoke for many of my highly educated, financially successful career changers; “I’m now ready to do what I really want to do. I worked hard to have a career I ended up hating because I did what I was supposed to do. I never stopped to think about who I am or what I care about.” The lesson here is that if you find yourself in pursuit of one of the top careers that most people are chasing after, slap yourself in the face and figure out what’s really driving this decision. If it’s mainly about looking good, getting ahead or gaining social status, chances are you’re going to end up in a job you won’t like or excel in. And, since so many people are stuck in the same trap, being miserable will seem normal.
Gary Vaynerchuk argues that social media has now made it easier than ever to cash in on your passion. Gary suggests that it is possible to start, promote, and build a brand around your passion with zero start up costs and a lot of sweat equity. Watch the video. What do you think?
Could a 4 day workweek for Utah state employees be better for the employees, environment, and state? Read the article below, and decide for yourself.
By PAUL FOY, Associated Press Writer Paul Foy, Associated Press Writer
Thu Oct 22, 8:04 am ET
SALT LAKE CITY – Closing Utah state offices on Fridays has delivered an unexpected bonus: a big saving on overtime pay.
New calculations show Utah saved $4.1 million in the first year of a government experiment with a four-day workweek.
State employees were eager to leave after the longer workday, and weren’t inclined to work an extra hour or two.
“They’re getting what they need to get done in 10 hours and going home,” said Angie Welling, spokeswoman for Gov. Gary Herbert.
“The state envisioned some energy savings, but that overtime number was not anticipated,” she said Wednesday.
Utah was the first state in the country to shut down most of its services on Fridays. Other states took notice. Hawaii tried a limited four-day week last fall, when a similar program was under way in Washington state. Lawmakers in at least two other states — West Virginia and Virginia — have also looked into adopting a four-day workweek.
Former Gov. Jon Huntsman made the switch for Utah in August 2008, largely to cut energy costs.
Utah, however, achieved only a sixth of the $3 million it expected to trim on energy costs.
The state couldn’t shut down as many state buildings as it planned on Fridays, officials said, and it didn’t save much by closing the smaller buildings.
Also, the state assumed gasoline for state fleet car use and building utility costs would soar, and it would save as much.
Both expenditures actually fell over the past year, however. Utah has some of the lowest utility rates in the country.
The energy saving came out to $502,000 for the year. The state also saved $200,000 on janitorial services. With reduced overtime expenses, the total saving was $4.8 million.
The figures were released Wednesday by Herbert’s strategic planner, Mike Hansen.
The new governor — Huntsman left to become the U.S. ambassador to China — is undecided on whether to stick with the program, Welling said.
“He’s still reviewing the results. He feels like we have good data on the amount of cost savings, employee satisfaction and the energy reduction. What he things is missing is input from the public,” she said.
To that end, Herbert will commission a poll of public sentiment — citizens lost a day of government service with the switch.
State workers are largely happy. Another survey found 85 percent of the workers like working four longer days better than five shorter ones.
Working mothers like Carolyn Dennis — she has two young sons — found a way to adjust.
“It’s actually a lot easier than the five-hour day, because I have all day Friday to clean and run errands and still have the whole weekend to spend with my kids,” said Dennis, customer service manager for the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing.
“I actually found it’s freed up my time. We never did anything in the evening anyway, but having that extra day has made it easier to be a working mom.”
Dennis leaves the Salt Lake City suburb of West Jordan at 5:45 a.m. with her youngest, a 2-year-old, in tow. she drops him at a day care center near work in downtown Salt Lake City. Her husband, a business owner, drops the couple’s 7-year-old son, a first-grader, at school.
Dennis works from 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., skipping lunch hour and leaving a half-hour earlier than normal. That allows her to cut down a long day for her youngest.
“I started out getting him dressed while he was still asleep, but now he’s getting up early for breakfast. Ryan is still on a malleable infant schedule. He’s happy and smiling when I drop him off, so it makes my day go better,” she said.
All things considered, Dennis would never switch back.
“I do love the 4/10 and told my boss if they take it away, I’ll probably cry,” she said.
