Tahani Tompkins was struggling to get callbacks for job interviews in the Chicago area this year when a friend made a suggestion: Change your name. Instead of Tahani, a distinctively African-American-sounding name, she began going by T. S. Tompkins in applications.
...That seemed startling somehow, maybe because of the popular perception that affirmative action still confers significant advantages to black job candidates, a perception that is not borne out in studies. Moreover, statistics show even college-educated blacks suffering disproportionately in this jobless environment compared with whites, as that article reported.
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2 comments:
That sucks. Makes a person tired and angry just to think about the kind of petty bull that people have to encounter in any given day. Going with just her initials also gives her the advantage of obscuring her gender. I've read that female authors are still advised to use initials rather than first names. Even if someone knows you're a woman, you seem like a more serious writer if you aren't too gendered in your reader's mind.
We talk about that with research papers in our family all the time. Women researchers do stand a better chance of being published in peer-reviewed journals if they obscure their gender. Which stinks. Luckily, in Beloved Wife's field, there are a number of men who use their initials, too.
Of course, once a paper goes to be refereed, they'll know who she is, b/c it's a pretty small sub-field. But still.
Whenever I send a resume, I tailor it to the organization/company. I routinely decide what I should do about feminist, lesbian, Pagan, and queer items on my resume. I can only think of one job where those things were an asset...
In fact, right now, anyone who's considering me for a job and does a Google search is going to find out an interesting boatload. Which was a decision I had to make when I decided to use my name on my public blog, and to set up my website for my ministry.
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