Lawyers in study gave legal memo a lower rating when told author was Black

[hayesc0]

I thought i remember hearing about this story looked at the date and realized it was a year ago still smh.

 

[Hiphoplives4eva]

"bu bu bu bu bu racism is dead!" - typical cac

 

[L0Qutus]

Everyone should actually click on the link and read the comments under the article. These motherfukkers are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to discredit the findings of the study.

RecentGrad said:
A couple of problems I see with this study - 1) we have no information on the demographic data for the reviewers - could that have skewed the results? 2) since all of the partners missed errors when reviewing BOTH memos, we have no way of knowing if the skill level of the partners played a part here.

IMHO, a more interesting study would be to use the same process for drafting the memo, but have TWO memos drafted, and then insert the same number and type of errors into each memo. Then have one set of partners review both memos (one supposedly drafted by a minority, one supposedly drafted by a white male) and see if the results show a bias.

Dr Phun said:
Perhaps the difference in the results was due, not because of race, but because of how the races were described. African-American is location based and its counterpart is European-American. White is color based and its counterpart would be black. (BTW, the study didn’t actually use color, but instead used an anthropological term.) Perhaps the participants in the study thought that African-American meant an immigrant to America from Africa of any race. Perhaps participants would have reacted more favorably than either to a Caribbean – American writer. Or they just had a negative reaction to a PC term. The point is that when this PC stuff isn’t controlled in a study, it mucks up the results and you don’t get reliable results because participants react to the terms that are used.

BMF said:
The study doesn't mention how it accounted for the partners' writing skills and tolerance for such errors. If someone handed me a memo (--I'm assuming a brief, here--) that had 22 errors, including 5 errors of fact and 4 errors in analysis, their score would be a lot lower than 3.2 out of 5--regardless of race. If it was submitted with a resume, the applicant would not be given serious consideration.

Guest said:
This is a very sad reality, but it might not be as evil as it sounds. As a young white male law grad in a terrible job market, I can tell you that many of my minority colleagues with lesser credentials landed jobs because their employers wanted "diversity". The problem is that this creates an implicit presumption among white males that the black employee "only got the job because he's black." I assume the results of this study would have been similar if you switched "African American associate" with "associate who's dad is the hiring partner".

These are the people we have to work with and determine performance ratings