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Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

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Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#101

Post by geofft »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #28

Is it possible to create a performance review system that somebody won't complain is sexist?

Trying to build a system where nobody will complain about sexism is like trying to build an infrastructure where nobody will compare about security bugs.

In turn, giving up on building a less sexist system because people will always complain is like giving up on building a more secure infrastructure because people will always complain.

Unless you are extraordinarily lucky at both the humans building what you're building and the inputs to your system (constraints about language and tech stack and problem domain on the security side; constraints about hiring sources and existing culture/public reputation and leadership on the employment side), you're always going to have security flaws in your infrastructure, and you're always going to have sexism in your employment processes. And even if you are this lucky, you're not going to eliminate people poking at your system and suggesting places where it seems to fall short. The important question is what you do about it, how severe the problems are now, and how the severity changes over time.

Just like there are plenty of ways to write software that take it as a given that implementors will screw up and attackers will be clever, there are also plenty of ways to design a performance review system that takes it as a given that some fraction of humans in your organization will have biases (conscious and unconscious) and will treat their coworkers according to their biases.

Honestly, some of the mitigations are the same: the first thing I'd reach for is defense-in-depth and auditing. If your system is consistently giving different results (whether it's hiring, or retention, or promotions, or salary) to people in different demographic groups in a way that seems to disprove the null hypothesis that the demographic is irrelevant to job performance, look very hard at it, add additional reviews to make sure the results are consistent even when different people are involved, and keep measuring. There might be good reasons that the disparity is legitimate (just like there might be good reasons that one of your servers is regularly opening outbound TCP connections to random machines in China), just make sure you are actually noticing that something unexpected is going on and try to find an explanation for it.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#102

Post by AlexCoventry »

alasdair_ wrote: post #67
mfoy_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a simpler and better claim would be that: When managers are faced with stack ranking employees, they will often decide based on factors not purely related to the productivity or value of the employee. ---- That, and as an employee in a stack-ranked organization, you know you need to be competitive. Not in terms of productivity but in terms of "in the eyes of your manager"-- Perception is more important than p…

>Studies have shown that men compete more aggressively than women, on average. Studies have also shown that when women exhibit identical "aggressive" behavior as men, they are labeled more negatively than their male counterparts.

Studies have also shown that social psychology is a morass of irreproducible results, so without links to detailed descriptions of their methodologies and hostile verifications, it's reasonable to be skeptical of these claims.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#103

Post by empath75 »

ardit33 wrote: post #92

I think this is a more issue of "Stack Ranking", which by itself should be illegal, but somewhat it is still legal. While pretty much all employment in the US is "at will" employment, "good faith" is assumed in the system.... Stack Ranking by default is a "bad faith" system, where the employer, will fire people, even though the employees were good performers (if you are in a team of all good performers, it is common…

It’s such a dumb way of doing business. Like on a surface level it makes sense — if you constantly let your worst performers go, the average quality of your employees has to go up, right?

But five minutes of thought will tell you that people will hate working on that environment and will quit or just not apply to work there.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#104

Post by sokoloff »

ardit33 wrote: post #92

I think this is a more issue of "Stack Ranking", which by itself should be illegal, but somewhat it is still legal. While pretty much all employment in the US is "at will" employment, "good faith" is assumed in the system.... Stack Ranking by default is a "bad faith" system, where the employer, will fire people, even though the employees were good performers (if you are in a team of all good performers, it is common…

Stack Ranking seems like it should be a perfectly legal method of performance management. You might choose to not work at a company that practices it, but why should it be illegal?

It is perhaps a natural fear that a Stack Ranking system would lead to a "Rank and Yank", but the mere ordering of employees during a performance management process doesn't give me any particular concern, nor do I consider it a bad faith system.

In fact, it forces people to make a sometimes hard choice, which I believe has more benefits than drawbacks to an organization, else you run the risk of having a massive "undifferentiated middle" and no clear development plans because you have no feedback from rich discussion about why Jane is better than Joe; instead Jane and Joe are simply declared to be equal without any discussion about what Joe could do to improve or what Jane should continue doing, etc.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#105

Post by kansface »

tptacek wrote: post #34
SamReidHughes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Edit: The parent post was edited. Are other employee evaluation schemes free of appearance of sexism (or actual sexism), or is it harder to see?

The edit wasn't necessary to support the first sentence. There are thousands of tech companies, large and small, and most of them monitor employee performance. Meanwhile: allegations of sexist bias in review processes are infrequent enough to be newsworthy. QED.

You claim the correlation between companies with allegations of sexism in employee review (covered by the news), and companies that do stack ranking are sufficiently strong to declare a causal relationship between the two - in fact, strong enough that the former is universally a consequence of the later?

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#106

Post by stinkytaco »

munchbunny wrote: post #54
SamReidHughes wrote: post #28

Is it possible to create a performance review system that somebody won't complain is sexist?

At a large enough scale, you can't avoid all complaints of sexism, because job performance doesn't exist in a controlled-experiment vacuum. To some extent your job performance always depends on how well you can work with colleagues, so if your company culture has sexism problem, there will always be a sexism problem whether or not it's openly discussed. But absolutely eliminating sexism isn't the bar most people are…

> In the vast majority of cases, you can iterate your way to a fair system with a clear rubric that controls for unconscious biases and establishes a substantial trail of evidence to support each judgement of performance. Actually doing that, especially when giving criticism, tends to be a matter of managerial skill.

I'm not sure this is true. A system with a clear rubric that will control for unconscious bias will be accused of reducing people to pure numbers and not consider factors that cannot be quantified. It's also entirely possible that the rubric may control for unconscious bias on the part of the manager, but introduce a whole new set of biases against one group or another.

This isn't to say we should make the effort. I actually feel that your point about managerial skill is perhaps the most important. Middle managers, the ones to whom ranking and performance evaluation fall, are often promoted from lower positions and do not have the background or training to be good managers. I'm not sure how to solve this problem, but in most organizations I've worked at this only way up is to management. Good workers turn into bad managers.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#107

Post by fullshark »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #28

Is it possible to create a performance review system that somebody won't complain is sexist?

It's impossible to create any system with actual consequences to human livelihoods that's free from complaints. Whatever their flavor.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#108

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ardit33 wrote: post #92

I think this is a more issue of "Stack Ranking", which by itself should be illegal, but somewhat it is still legal. While pretty much all employment in the US is "at will" employment, "good faith" is assumed in the system.... Stack Ranking by default is a "bad faith" system, where the employer, will fire people, even though the employees were good performers (if you are in a team of all good performers, it is common…

Decimation was a punishment for serious offences, like mutiny or desertion- not for performing badly in battle, or being cowardly.

With Romans, specifically, if cowardice was punished, there would be noone left. They were disciplined and had great quality equipment, but their morale was not the highest. For instance, before they met the Germans on the field, having heard of the military prowerss of their enemy, the Romans would spend their time crying and making their will, certain that they'd die in battle - Cesar has written about this.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#109

Post by nohat »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #108
ardit33 wrote: post #92

I think this is a more issue of "Stack Ranking", which by itself should be illegal, but somewhat it is still legal. While pretty much all employment in the US is "at will" employment, "good faith" is assumed in the system.... Stack Ranking by default is a "bad faith" system, where the employer, will fire people, even though the employees were good performers (if you are in a team of all good performers, it is common…

Decimation was a punishment for serious offences, like mutiny or desertion- not for performing badly in battle, or being cowardly. With Romans, specifically, if cowardice was punished, there would be noone left. They were disciplined and had great quality equipment, but their morale was not the highest. For instance, before they met the Germans on the field, having heard of the military prowerss of their enemy, the R…

Cowardice in the form of running away from battle was definitely a cause for decimation.

Re: Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says

#110

Post by lstyls »

sokoloff wrote: post #104
ardit33 wrote: post #92

I think this is a more issue of "Stack Ranking", which by itself should be illegal, but somewhat it is still legal. While pretty much all employment in the US is "at will" employment, "good faith" is assumed in the system.... Stack Ranking by default is a "bad faith" system, where the employer, will fire people, even though the employees were good performers (if you are in a team of all good performers, it is common…

Stack Ranking seems like it should be a perfectly legal method of performance management. You might choose to not work at a company that practices it, but why should it be illegal? It is perhaps a natural fear that a Stack Ranking system would lead to a "Rank and Yank", but the mere ordering of employees during a performance management process doesn't give me any particular concern, nor do I consider it a bad faith s…

I don't agree, but you make a valid point so I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

But I think it's fair to assume that in most minds stack ranking includes a fire quota, and that's what most commenters mean here.

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