Candidates presented to jobs as retail salespersons, servers, kitchen staff, janitors, or security guards: No discrimination at the callback stage against Indigenous Peoples, nor applicants from Indian reservations

Employment Discrimination against Indigenous Peoples in the United States: Evidence from a Field Experiment. Patrick Button, Brigham Walker. NBER Working Paper No. 25849. May 2019. https://www.nber.org/papers/w25849

Abstract: We conducted a resume correspondence experiment to measure discrimination in hiring faced by Indigenous Peoples in the United States (Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians). We sent employers realistic 13,516 resumes for common jobs (retail sales, kitchen staff, server, janitor, and security) in 11 cities and compared callback rates. We signaled Indigenous status in one of four different ways. We almost never find any differences in callback rates, regardless of the context. These findings hold after numerous robustness checks, although our checks and discussions raise multiple concerns that are relevant to audit studies generally.

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Conclusion
Our results from a large-scale field experiment of hiring discrimination where we sent 13,516 job applications of on-average identical applicants who were either Indigenous or white to jobs as retail salespersons, servers, kitchen staff, janitors, or security guards show a lack of discrimination at the callback stage, in net, against Indigenous Peoples. We also do not find bias against Native American applicants from Indian reservations.We do not find discrimination even when we estimate separately by city, occupation, or occupation and gender.