Niti and Aamir were advised to alter their names to secure employment in Australia. They are not the only ones going through this.

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A new study reveals that during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, hiring discrimination against ethnic minorities in leadership positions saw a significant decline.
However, discrimination persisted for non-leadership roles, highlighting uneven recruitment practices across different job levels.
Researchers submitted 1,239 applications for leadership roles and 7,179 for non-leadership positions in response to 3,500 job ads across six professions in Australia.

When Niti Bhargava struggled to find a suitable job in her industry, her recruiter suggested she try using an ‘Anglo’ name.

“It was frustrating because I had all the qualifications, but I wasn’t getting any callbacks,” she said.

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Niti Bhargava is a financial expert in Melbourne. Credit: Supplied by Niti Bhargava

“I believe my ethnic name played a role in that. At times, I was called ‘Niki’, and my last name was even mispronounced as ‘Baklava’,” Bhargava, who now runs a financial firm in Melbourne, recalled.

“But I didn’t want to change my identity,” said Bhargava, who founded her own firm five years ago after struggling to find a leadership role in the financial sector.

Aamir Qutub, an IT professional, shares facing a similar challenge when he migrated over 10 years ago.

“I applied for over 300 jobs in three months and didn’t get a single interview. This could have been due to my ethnic name as well as my lack of local experience,” he said.

Aamir Qutub is the CEO and founder of Geelong-based company Enterprise Monkey, a multinational digital organisation. Source: Supplied / Aamir Qutub

“I know many international students who have changed their names to ‘Mark’ or ‘James’, and it was one of the suggestions I received from a fellow student. However, I didn’t like the idea of changing my identity,” he said.

“Over the years, I’ve mentored hundreds of international students who face the same challenge, especially in non-technical roles. The barriers are lower in tech and engineering, but the struggle remains real for many.”

For him, the key to overcoming these challenges has been mentoring, building strong connections through one-on-one interactions, and securing valuable referrals.

Did workplace bias against ethnic names change during COVID-19?

The first-of-its-kind study published in explored ethnic discrimination in hiring, focusing on applicants with Chinese and Indian names applying for leadership and non-leadership roles.

The study aimed to understand if COVID-19’s labour market shock influenced ethnic bias in recruitment.

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The research involved 1,239 applications for leadership roles and 7,179 for non-leadership positions submitted to 3,500 job ads across six professions in Australia, including accountancy, marketing specialists and electricians.

The researchers said the study manipulated names on identical resumes (for example, Chinese names like Memei Cheung, Indian names like Ankit Gupta, and English names like Jennifer Brown) to measure discrimination.

Professor Andreas Leibbrandt, who led the study, explained that the gap in hiring discrimination between English names and ethnic names “largely disappeared for leadership positions during the pandemic”, a shift from the more pronounced discrimination that existed before COVID-19.

Professor Andreas Leibbrandt from Monash Business School’s Department of Economics. Credit: Professor Andreas Leibbrandt

“During the pandemic, there were fewer callbacks for all applications, including those with English names. For leadership roles, callbacks for all applicants fell to nearly five per cent across all name types, compared to pre-COVID times, when English names received double the callbacks of other ethnic names,” he said.

“So ethnic hiring discrimination largely vanished for leadership positions during the pandemic.”

The study noted that organisations may seek to drive change, including diversifying their leadership.

“Hiring diverse leaders could help organisations justify a weak performance by blaming their diversity and inclusion ‘experiments’,” it said for the shift noticed during the pandemic.

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In contrast, the ethnicity gap remained highly statistically significant for non-leadership positions for both Chinese and Indian names.

“Before COVID, the response rate for resumes with Indian names in non-leadership roles was around 12 per cent, while those with English names received approximately 25 per cent,” he said, noting that this trend remained unchanged during the pandemic.

The latest study suggests that government anti-discrimination initiatives during the pandemic may have reduced bias.

“One reason for these findings could be that government anti-discrimination initiatives and campaigns to reduce COVID-related discrimination against ethnic minorities had some bearing,” Leibbrandt said.

The Fair Work Act 2009 safeguards employees in Australia from workplace discrimination.

Australia’s federal anti-discrimination laws are also established under the , and which prohibit employers from making adverse decisions against candidates based on age, disability, race or gender.

The study also suggests some proactive steps for employers.

“Organisations and job search websites could implement anonymous job applications, in which the applicants’ names are hidden in the initial recruitment phase,” the study notes.

“New recruitment tools using artificial intelligence to assess applicants with objective algorithms could also help reduce the impact of ethnicity,” Leibbrandt said.

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