A decades-old investigative technique the federal government uses to expose evidence of discriminatory home-selling practices nationwide is also an effective tool to uncover patterns of hiring discrimination.
The US Justice and Housing and Urban Development departments both use matched-pair testing—also called auditing—to clamp down on real estate agents who violate fair-housing standards by denying equal opportunities to home buyers based on their race, religion, and other protected characteristics.
Agencies charged with curtailing workplace discrimination could yield similar successes in detecting bias issues at the early stage of the hiring process if they adopt this “underutilized” testing method, according to a new report from the New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy and the National Employment Law Project that was provided to Bloomberg Law.
Under matched-pair testing, two or more individuals with similar qualifications—but of different races, gender identities, or other protected classes—would pose as applicants for the same job at the same company to test whether they would be treated differently based on their race.
The test’s findings, which may include who gets to the next stage in the hiring process and how differently the testers were treated, would be analyzed to assess whether illegal bias occurred.
Using this tool to target...
FOLLOWING Nigeria’s 66th Independence Day anniversary on 1 October 2026, political figures and public officials issued statements assessing the nation’s progress. Among them was the presidential c...