http://fortune.com/2014/11/04/hiring-racial-bias/

This is one of those employment discrimination studies using fake resumes, but with an interesting twist.

The results? Young African-Americans still face persistent discrimination in the job market, and it is not tied to socioeconomic status, a lack of a degree, or other factors. Overall, black applicants were invited in for interviews 15.2% of the time, while white applicants received invitations 18% of the time. To put it another way, African-Americans were 16% less likely to get called in for an interview.

But:

Black applicants faced major discrimination when applying for jobs with a customer focus. Researchers looked for jobs with words like “customer,” “sales,” “advisor,” “representative,” “agent,” and “loan officer” in the description. For jobs such as these, the discrimination gap soared. Instead of facing a 2.8 percentage-point gap between callback rates for whites and blacks, they faced a 4.4-point gap.

For jobs with descriptions that lacked those terms and were instead focused on interaction with coworkers, the level of discrimination collapsed. Descriptions with terms such as “manager,” “administrator,” “coordinator,” “operations,” and so forth, the difference in callback rates was 0.1 to 0.3 percentage points.

In other words, the problem isn’t that Joe Smith doesn’t want to hire young African-Americans, but that he is worried that if he hires a black sales associate, old Mrs. Jones may take her business elsewhere.

I found this really fascinating. Blacks have a pretty significant disadvantage for customer-oriented roles, but not for employee-oriented roles. If in general customer-oriented roles are less prestigious or less well-paying, then it would seem that the barriers they face are less about advancing up the ladder and more about getting their foot in the door in the first place with a lower-level position. Any thoughts?