‘Anonymous Résumés’ Fuel Debate

Typically, in France, “they throw away the résumés of people who are from bad parts of town which are supposed to have Arabs or blacks,” Bebear, 70, said in an interview. “When you have somebody whose name is Mohammed and he lives in St. Denis,” a low-income community outside Paris, “you say, ‘I won’t bother with that one,’ and so they don’t even answer them.”

The solution, Bebear said, is to strip résumés of anything that could tip off recruiters to a person’s racial, ethnic and national background or other information that could be used to discriminate — name, age, sex, even residential postal code. “Then the man who is in charge of recruitment will look at that and say, ‘Oh, that résumé is a very good one. Send me that guy,’ and in the folder he has in front of him is an old black woman or a handicapped person.”
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A report the institute published in 2004 cited a study showing that a job applicant with a French-sounding name was five times more likely to be called for an interview than someone with an identical résumé but an Arabic- or North African-sounding name. That bias contributed to unemployment rates as high as 40 percent — four times the national average — among young men in low-income communities outside Paris, according to the report.

Armed with such data, Bebear and the Montaigne Institute have persuaded about 300 companies — including the Total energy group, the car manufacturer Peugeot Citroen, the steel giant Arcelor and SNCF, the national railway — to sign a charter pledging to oppose discrimination and make their companies “reflect the diversity of France.”

Among the recommendations in an accompanying report were that companies use anonymous résumés in hiring, produce annual reports charting progress in ending discrimination, and create internships to start young minority people on career paths.

Bebear said the proposals were meant to correct inequities without American-style affirmative action programs, which are illegal under French law and viewed by many people here — Bebear included — as antithetical to French culture and society.

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