Research has found that a racial bias was indicated among academics at Australian universities.
Researchers emailed about seven-thousand academics at Australian universities, with identical content of a prospective PhD student seeking to have a short meeting with the academic to discuss the potential of doctoral supervision.
The only difference was the implied racial backgrounds of the eight names used in the study.
The results showed that prospective students with white-European names were more likely to receive responses than those from non-white backgrounds.
The name Melissa Smith was 12 per cent more likely to receive a response than Rahul Kumar.
One of the authors of the study, Megan MacKenzie from Simon Fraser University in Canada, said this discrepancy was caused by the apparent racial bias of academics.