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Koon Yew Yin helpfully calls out the New Straits Times’ Awang Hitam for an inglorious column of Dec 22 entitled ‘Modern day apartheid?’

The NST article made a passing reference to a study on hiring discrimination that I conducted with Muhammed Abdul Khalid.

Unfortunately, instead of confronting the more central problems with that column piece, especially the hysterical association of the apartheid South African white minority’s total and brutal command over political, economic and military power with the position of Malaysian Chinese, Koon spends much of his article relaunching misguided and refuted criticisms of our research.

Clearly blood still flows through this issue; it makes me perplexed why he so badly wants to pronounce our research “way past its shelf life”. Is he saying that our findings, publicised only one year ago, are outdated? Or does he wish that the uncomfortable implications of our research will just go away?

 

Why he remains so zealous to dismiss the research is a puzzle. In his haste, Koon regurgitates portions of his article criticising our study, published on Nov 10, 2012. We roundly rebutted his contentions in a response published on Nov 16, 2012, pointing out how he misunderstood our study and how his arguments did not hold.

Instead of dealing with our study’s research questions or critiqueing the validity of our method and findings, he dismissed our work for not answering his preferred questions and failed to comprehend that one of the objectives of academic research is to raise questions for further research, since not all questions can be answered within one project. Perhaps he read it, perhaps he did not.

Either way, one year later he rehashes the criticisms that we have refuted.

In very brief summary, this study set out to objectively and empirically assess the form and magnitude of racial discrimination. Our central question was: When employers receive Malay and Chinese resumes of comparable quality, are they significantly more likely to call one group for interview but not the other? If yes, this is an indication of racial discrimination, because we have isolated race as the differentiating factor and controlled for quality of applicants.

To address the form and magnitude of racial discrimination, as we did, is sufficient and laborious enough for one study. We did not obtain much information to elaborately answer why we obtained the results, but that this limitation does not in any way nullify the racial discrimination that we observe.

Cool light on a heated subject

We have been able to shed some cool light on a heated subject often inflamed by biased anecdotes, limited experience and small samples. Our conclusions, and questions raised for further research, are based on a careful, conscientious, and methodical field experiment conducted on a large sample.

This is also a much more reliable method than surveying employers, since we observe actual decisions made by employers, not their professed views or attitudes. Few if any employers will admit that they discriminate by race, and yet, after nine months of this field experiment that sent 3,012 applications to 753 job openings, we find troubling evidence of racial discrimination in the private sector. (We wanted to study the public sector as well, but could not for technical reasons.)

We are not dealing with small differences or remote cases. For every 1,000 Chinese resumes that we sent to job openings, 221 got called for interview (22.1 percent callback rate). For every 1,000 Malay resumes, 42 were called (4.2 percent callback rate).

I should stress that we carefully and systematically ensured that there are equivalent numbers of high-scoring Chinese and Malays, so that we do not create scenarios of lesser qualified Malays being filtered out on merit, which is foremost in Koon’s mind and in many reactions. Indeed, higher scoring Malays fare poorer than lower scoring Chinese.

We obtain a 5.2 percent callback rate for Malay resumes with Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of 3.1-3.9, while 20.7 percent of Chinese resumes with CGPA of 2.2-3.0 got called for interview (The maximum CGPA is 4.0).

Koon rejects our research outcomes because we only ascertain the existence of racial discrimination but do not concretely answer why we obtained the results.

Applying a similar logic, Koon should dismiss the findings of the Auditor-General’s report because it only finds cases of abuse and corruption in public spending, but fails to explain why they occur.

Still, he embraces one of our results, which is apparently not “way past its shelf life”. He greets with alacrity our finding that Malay companies also show a bias against Malay applicants and in favour of Chinese peers. Yes, we also find this interesting, and it is one of the ways our study might help structure further studies.

Hopefully future research will be done to follow up on this study and to examine the big why question, and to unpack the underlying complexities and controversies.

Koon already has the answer. He boils it down to one factor: “The reason why Malays are seemingly being discriminated... is because the better-qualified Malays prefer to join the civil service where they do not have to compete with the non-Malays”. Yes, this is plausible, but surely there are myriad other factors that should not be discounted while making simplistic assertions.

Perhaps more consequentially, though, Koon implies that being able to explain the study’s findings in some way cleanses them from being a reflection of racial discrimination. If we can show that there is a reason racial discrimination happens, then it ceases to be racial discrimination.

Warped logic

Is he suggesting that previous negative experiences with hiring Malay graduates makes it acceptable for employers to call only 5.2 percent of  Malay graduates with CGPA above 3.1 for interview, but be willing to call 20.7 percent of Chinese graduates with CGPA below 3.1?

Such warped logic is also employed in the ‘modern day Apartheid?’ article. Awang Hitam would like us to believe that the NEP’s second prong - which is the basis for the vast array of bumiputera preferential programmes - is not discriminatory, because it was designed to achieve inter-ethnic parity and national unity.

No, no, no. The second prong of the NEP is indisputably, inherently, emphatically discriminatory, because it laid the groundwork for the introduction or expansion of ethnic quotas, bumiputera preferential programmes and bumiputera-exclusive institutions. Yes, it ideally serves a higher purpose, but that does not in any way evaporate the discriminatory elements.

These are historical facts that we should learn to acknowledge plainly, without grievance or malice.

Can we stop this vicious circus of mutual accusations and denials?


LEE HWOK AUN is senior lecturer in development studies at Universiti Malaya.

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