Or, to be more precise, having a name that takes longer to pronounce correlates with lowered job prospects with the sampled group for this study.
Qi Ge (Vassar College) and Stephen Wu (Hamilton College) are economists. They studied the employment prospects of 1,500 recent graduates of economics doctoral programs by measuring the acquisition of tenure-track positions at institutions with high research productivity. An algorithm assessed the pronounceability of names by the "commonality of letter and phoneme combinations" within those names.
One standard deviation in the time that it takes to pronounce a person's name reduced the likelihood of attaining a tenure-track position by 8%. Although anti-bias training of hiring committee members may address the pronounceability of the names of candidates, such training does not appear to have made a significant impact on the cost of having a name that takes a long time to pronounce.
You can read the full text of Ge and Wu's paper at SSRN.
-via Marginal Revolution
Samir: "No one in this country can ever pronounce my name right. It's not that hard: Na-ghee-na-na-jar. Nagheenanajar."