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Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#101

Post by briandear »

macinjosh wrote: post #93

This will be unpopular but I don't care. What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire women? Is there a reserve of unemployed non-male engineers out there? If so what evidence is there of that? Technical talent is both expensive and a rare commodity for tech companies. The non-male engineers I've worked with have always been exceedingly competent,…

That is very interesting. What are the stats for unemployed female engineers? Is there a shortage of female representation because female engineers aren’t being hired or is there a shortage because there are actually fewer female engineers?

There is a shortage of male therapists and kindergarten teachers: is that because males aren’t being hired or because there are fewer of them in existence?

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#103

Post by stef25 »

electrograv wrote: post #44

I wish we could move away from resumes for tech role screening anyway, since they convey very little real reliable information. I’ve seen too many great hires from candidates with relatively weak resumes, and failed interviews from candidates with great resumes (and obviously vice versa). I’m not sure what the best alternative should be, though. I am a fan of open source work as a sort of code portfolio, but it doesn…

> author-blind reviews

Should I ever be in a position to hire a colleague, I wouldn't ever do so without having a chat with them.

I spend 8hrs a day in an office with my colleagues (sometimes more than with my wife & kid) and the ones I can't stand is about the only thing wrong with my job.

If we can't even see the person's face over some gender bias hysteria then I wonder how the hell we got here.

People should just get over the fact that men and women are different.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#104

Post by griffinmb »

al_chemist wrote: post #87

Alice: Our AI says that graduates from that Boston college are poor job candidates. Bob: Seems reasonable, that college's teaching quality is bad. -- Alice: Our AI says that graduates from that all-women college are poor job candidates. Bob: That can't be right, we all know that women are great job candidates whichever college they graduated.

*college

Also, it isn't entirely clear what you are trying to say. If you are suggesting that school-based screening is also problematic, then you are probably on the right track.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#105

Post by hellogoodbyeeee »

Spooky23 wrote: post #39
throwawaymath wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could this be a direct indicator of a powerful subconscious bias in Amazon's existing hiring process? Yes, but only in the obvious sense that we all already knew: tech companies hire more men than women for technology-focused roles. That's not to say it isn't an issue; it is, but it's nothing new, and almost certainly not unique to Amazon. Without significant oversight and manual tuning, any training dataset based…

I spent a number of years working in tech organizations where the male:female ratio was 60:40. Now I work in a similar org with the same rules where it's more like 85:15. The difference is that old place transitioned administrative staff to IT roles in the 90s/early 2000s when more things were computerized. Those admins, financial analysts, program analysts were more likely to be female and had degrees in liberal art…

Do FAANG companies train software developers? I think they are big enough and opinionated enough organizations that they might be better at training a "FAANG quality developer" in a year or so than current University system can in four years.

I wish companies were more willing to train willing applicants instead of trying to interview for capabilities.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#106

Post by erikpukinskis »

kareemsabri wrote: post #79
kaitai wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole aim of the AI was to make decisions like the recruiters did -- that is explicitly what they were aiming to do. It might be worth reading the article as it addresses your two ideas (the aim of the project and the fact that the training set was indeed heavily male).

Hey. I did read the article. It doesn’t support the conclusion OP is drawing. The aim of the AI is to “mechanize the search for talent”. It doesn’t care to, nor have any means to, make decisions “like the recruiters did”. Obviously machines don’t make decisions like humans do. They’re trying to reverse engineer an alternate decisions making process from the previous outcomes.

Aren't the "previous outcomes" past hiring decisions though?

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#107

Post by kareemsabri »

fuscy wrote: post #84
kareemsabri wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t seem to be a reasonable conclusion. There is no reason to assume the AI’s assessment methods will mirror those of the recruiters. If Amazon did most of it’s hiring when programming was a task primarily performed by men, and so Amazon didn’t receive many female applicants, they could be unbiased while still amassing a data set that skewed heavily male. The machine would then just correctly assess that fem…

I'm going to make a supposition here but one of the first things I think they did (especially when trying to fix the AI) was to balance and normalize the data so that there would be no skew between men and women number of records in the data set. If my supposition is correct then the other parameters are at fault here from which gender and language used stick out. Another supposition I'm going to make is that they ev…

If they did normalize the data across gender, then you’re correct it may indicate bias on Amazon’s part. But I don’t know about that. The article doesn’t provide enough information. I think it should be obvious, to Amazon as well, that if you want to repair inequality in a trait (gender) you can’t use an unequal dataset to train a machine to select people. I just don’t think it follows that machine bias must mirror human bias.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#108

Post by komali2 »

arbitrage wrote: post #46
komali2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your frustration, but in my experience recruiting, the primary reason behind there being less women getting hired into engineering roles is almost never raw sexism. Maybe in the 90s, but in the early 10s there was tons of policy around it, bosses were setting the culture, we were doing everything "right." But we were still not hiring that many women, simply because hardly any women ever applied. For chem…

> but in my experience recruiting, the primary reason behind there being less women getting hired into engineering roles is almost never raw sexism. In my experience in the industry, this is a laughable statement to make. It's a shame that unless one is a victim of unconscious, systemic bias, one is so much less likely to acknowledge it as a problem, that actually exists, and hurts people all the time.

I don't understand what you're saying - is your argument that only victims of unconscious bias will recognize it as a problem?

If that's your point, I guess my counter argument is myself, not a victim, very aware of the problem, and acknowledging it as a problem as my post.

There's also the victims of conscious bias that would probably be able to acknowledge the problem...

Am I misreading your post?

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#109

Post by trustmath »

thoughtexplorer wrote: post #75
exo762 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not "women are just not as interested in math, logic and computer science to pursue it AS OFTEN as men"? Why are you not considering this possibility?

Because that's an inconvenient truth that doesn't fit the oppressor vs oppressed narrative.

Truth over the belief of who is actually 'the best fit' for a job doesn't exist until the job is complete. This isn't about oppression. It's about discrimination magically becoming automated because no one bothers to look for these things pre-deployment.

Re: Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

#110

Post by commandlinefan »

macinjosh wrote: post #93

This will be unpopular but I don't care. What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire women? Is there a reserve of unemployed non-male engineers out there? If so what evidence is there of that? Technical talent is both expensive and a rare commodity for tech companies. The non-male engineers I've worked with have always been exceedingly competent,…

Yeah - I'm not even expressing an unpopular opinion, just asking a (leading) question: where are all these women who are chomping at the bit to get into _technical_ positions like programming but find themselves being turned away by biased recruiters? I've never even seen somebody _claim_ that they were a woman who couldn't find a tech job, just people wondering where all the women were.
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