Like it or not, name can impact your career

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Throughout Shuki Khalili’s career, he suspected his name might be holding him back. When he worked for a Wall Street headhunter, he felt potential clients would blow him off when they heard his name. When he started his own business selling greeting cards, phones sales were initially a bust at first.

“I tried using an American name, ‘Andrew Warner,’ and suddenly I could at least engage them in conversation and sell them some ads so I could build my business,” he said. He now goes by Andrew Warner and runs a successful entrepreneurial resource site called Mixergy.com in Santa Monica, Calif.

Like it or not, your name can make a difference in how seriously you are taken at work and whether you even get your foot in the door for the interview.

One study by researchers at MIT and the University of Chicago found that job applicants with names that sounded African-American got short shrift when it came to the hiring process. The researchers sent out 5,000 fake resumes, and it turned out that resumes with names such as Tyrone and Tamika were less likely to get calls from prospective employers than their Anglo-sounding counterparts, and qualifications seemed to have little impact.

For Larry Whitten, owner of the Whitten Hotel in Taos, N.M., names mattered so much that he ordered a group of Hispanic employees change their names to sound more Anglo Saxon. For example, changing Martin (pronounced Mar-TEEN) to plain-old Martin or Marco to Mark.

At the Taos hotel, Whitten explained, when some workers answered the phones and said their names, customers didn’t understand what they were saying. For example, Mar-TEEN, sounded like “my thing,” he said.

“I am not a racist,” said Whitten, who fired several employees for insubordination. What motivated his decisions, he stressed, was the bottom line.

“I’m not accustomed to Spanish lingo. A lot of people have the same thing,” he said. “If a name is going to prevent me from getting a guest because they hang up or can’t understand it or they get frustrated, I have to do something about it.”

He said he had operated a hotel in Oklahoma where 99 percent of his employees were African American and did a similar thing. “I changed five or six names without any trouble there,” he said. “Latasha to Tasha, to make it easy.”

What’s in a name
Indeed, it’s what people don’t know or understand that is sometimes at the heart of prejudice. And catering to such ignorance is no excuse for workplace discrimination, experts stressed.

“Customer preferences and co-worker preferences are never something that can justify discrimination,” said Ernest Haffner, senior attorney adviser at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“Changing somebody’s name is something that could be viewed as intentionally discriminatory or not but it still could have a disparate impact” on a certain group of workers, said Haffner, who would not comment directly on the New Mexico hotel workers’ situation because he did not know the details. “If the employer feels people are uncomfortable with workers that have foreign-sounding names, then the employer is adopting the biases of the customers or co-workers.”

If, however, the employer has some legitimate business reason for asking a worker to change his or her name, he said, and is not only singling out one group, then that may be a different story.

Full disclosure here: My own family, Greek immigrants from Istanbul, has grappled with the name issue for years.

My grandfather, whose first name was Soukias, worked in a New York textile factory and was told by his boss when he started: “Your name is now Joe.” Also, my sister, an attorney in Virginia, changed her name to Tahmin from Tahmincioglu because an employer told her to pick a name that sounded more American. And more than one editor has asked me if I used my whole name on a byline.

I chose to keep my last name, but my real first name is Evanthia. I go by Eve professionally.

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