A Midwestern men’s healthcare company is blaming a disgruntled employee for rejection emails sent to as many as 20 applicants via the Indeed job search site. The messages, which appear to have been sent only to black applicants, start out politely enough, only to take a nasty turn.
Hermeisha Robinson, of St. Louis, was the first to post the hideous email she received to Facebook.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, Quinntellia Fields posted a nearly identical email, this time with a typo in the subject line.
After Robinson’s post gained media attention, multiple reports of similar rejection emails addressed to other women have surfaced, all from the same company, Mantality Health. All recipients of the email were black women, with names like Lequitta and Dorneisha. The owner of Mantality Health, which caters to patients with low testosterone in Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin, immediately claimed the company had been hacked.
Kevin Meuret, the owner of Mantality, believes a former employee hacked the system and generated the emails from a remote website.
He said he's filed police reports in St. Louis County, Chesterfield and the state where he believes the hacking originated from. Meuret told 5 On Your Side he reached out to Robinson to apologize.
After further investigation—and a public rebuking of the hacking claim by Indeed.com—Meuret offered clarification and more specifics on the “deplorable” situation.
In an interview with Riverfront Times, Mantality owner Kevin Meuret says his company's Indeed.com account was breached by "potentially an ex-employee" from outside Missouri. Meuret believes that the hacker sent twenty racist rejection emails before the company became aware of the situation and shut down the Indeed.com account.
According to Meuret, the unknown hacker not only targeted black women, but also Mantality employee Jordan Kimler, whose name was manually entered in the signature-field of the messages.
"For some reason it was a personal attack on her," Meuret says. "I'm deeply upset that her name was tied to something that disgusting. Anyone associated with her knows that doesn't match with anything she's said."
According to Meuret, Kimler, the nurse practitioner with Mantality whose name is attached to the racist rejections, has nothing to do with hiring.
Regardless of whether it was a hacker, disgruntled employee, or Kimler herself, who dismissed the applicants’ names as “ghetto,” the black women impacted by this bigotry are left reeling, hurt, and confused by the characterization.
Dorneisha Zachery
“My name has meaning to me. It’s not ‘ghetto,’” Dorneisha Zachery told KMOV. “It’s just unique. My father’s name is Herman, so I’m Hermeisha,” explained Robinson in the same segment.
It might be easy for some to shrug this incident off as an obvious prank—after all, what kind of company would be so bold as to announce such a racist policy, and in writing, no less? The thing is, name discrimination is a very, very real thing, as proven in a 2002 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. [...]
The 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant, NBER Faculty Research Fellows Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan note in Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination. It indicates that a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience. [...]
...discrimination levels are statistically uniform across all the occupation and industry categories covered in the experiment. Federal contractors, sometimes regarded as more severely constrained by affirmative action laws, do not discriminate less. Neither do larger employers, or employers who explicitly state that they are "Equal Opportunity Employer" in their ads.
It’s not just black people, either.
A two-year study published (in 2016) in the Administrative Science Quarterly Journal found that Asian job candidates in the U.S. were almost twice as likely to receive a call back if they whitened their resumes by changing their names and excluding race-based honors and organizations. (The same was true for African-American candidates).
Just one year later, another study took it all the way back to the ‘80s.
Americans are as racist as they were back in the late 1980s — at least in one crucial area: jobs.
A new study, by researchers at Northwestern University, Harvard, and the Institute for Social Research in Norway, looked at every available field experiment on hiring discrimination from 1989 through 2015. The researchers found that anti-black racism in hiring is unchanged since at least 1989, while anti-Latino racism may have decreased modestly.
And yet another 2017 study indicates that this also isn’t just an American problem.
(A) new study from researchers at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto, both in Canada.[...] found that job applicants in Canada with Asian names — names of Indian, Pakistani or Chinese origin — were 28 percent less likely to get called for an interview compared to applicants with Anglo names, even when all the qualifications were the same.
Mic also reports that masculine or gender-neutral names are proven to help women get more interviews, and folks whose resumés reflect a religious background—whether through name alone or through work experience—are also penalized, with Muslims receiving the brunt of religious bias.
Notably, none of these studies even begin to tackle racial, gender, or religious bias in the workplace—these stats are just about getting a simple callback for an interview.
As a person of color with a pretty “white-sounding” name, I’ve encountered the occasional employer who had the gall to ask me why I didn’t tell them I was black during phone interviews. (My go-to answer: “Why didn’t you tell me you were white?”) It’s easy to understand why some of the Mantality Health applicants targeted by the so-called “prank” are now questioning not only themselves, but the unique names they were given by their parents, some of whom are dead.
This “prank” might have been targeting Mantality Health, and one employee in particular, but it caused real pain because the supposed punchline—and the undeniable bias it relies on—is far too real to the victims.
