Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by nkassis » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #29

ncallaway wrote: post #3

I would guess that the training data for the ML set was the set of all resumes and an indicator of whether the candidate was eventually hired (maybe with supplemental data about how far in the process the candidate got). Could this be a direct indicator of a powerful subconscious bias in Amazon's existing hiring process?

Could this be a direct indicator of a powerful subconscious bias in Amazon's existing hiring process? Maybe - but maybe not. Imagine a company with 2 men in HR, 2 women in HR, 40 men in engineering, and 10 women in engineering. That's with gender-blind hiring, reflecting only the 4:1 ratio of male to female CS graduates. If you picked a random male hire, there's a 40/42=95% chance they're an engineer whereas if you p…

If they naively just feed the entire dataset without some inspection maybe. But I doubt the people working on this model stopped at the most basic level. What you describe is a common class imbalance issue. I would expect that they have accounted and addressed (at a minimum oversampling the less represented class for example) for this issue while working on the model.

So I doubt it's enough to explain their issue here. I agree that we can't really take any conclusion of their broader hiring patterns from this experiment.

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

#212

Post by sol_remmy » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #207

macinjosh wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think white men care so much about keeping down other groups of people that they would prioritize it over making more money and having more access to good workers? That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

It doesn't need to be deliberate or conscious. It can be incidental. Or maybe women just aren't as smart as men.

No body thinks that. You're way outside the overton window.

Why is the health care field heavily biased in favor or female nurses and doctors? Are women smarter than men when it comes to biology/anatomy?

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

#213

Post by zby » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

macinjosh wrote: post #191

zby wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So everyone you haver worked with have always been exceedingly competent and smart?

Obviously not. Every time I've worked with someone incompetent they tend to get fired rather quickly and I don't work with them anymore. As far as female vs. male goes I've worked with way more males than females and I just haven't happened to work with any females that have been fired for incompetence. Perhaps my level of judgement on other's performance is too lax but I tend to focus on my own performance and less…

So there were a few incompetent males, no incompetent females - but you believe that it is just a statistical fluke. It might be - but it is still evidence for the bias, just very weak. I noted it because it seemed that you used it as an argument against bias - which it isn't.

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

#214

Post by arandr0x » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

Dirlewanger wrote: post #202

commandlinefan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's taking a little longer than it should, but people are finally starting to realize that the actual reason there aren't as many women in software is because they've chosen not to be. They're wired differently and therefore have different interests.

I see this argument a lot but your exposition is less inflammatory than most. Please note this: when you tell a mixed-gender group of people that all women are "wired" to not like programming, you are telling the women who do like programming (which, let's be real, is most of them on Hacker News) that they're in effect not real women (or defective women, in an engineering sense). Or that they don't count.

Since you're presumably not a woman, and they are, they object to your seeming to be taking it upon yourself to tell them what a woman is.

It's not unlikely that most women don't want to be in software. Most men don't want to be in software! But hundreds of thousands of women are, in fact, working as programmers. Whenever tech news talks about hiring women, presumably, they're talking about hiring these women. Why pretend they don't exist?

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

#215

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

dudul wrote: post #144

bicubic wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last place I worked at had to invest in additional resources to hire several females because the office was mostly male and applicants were overwhelmingly male. We did eventually find a few great female applicants, but it took a lot of work and a lot of time dedicated specifically to that goal. There does not exist some magical undiscovered pool of talented female engineers that are being turned away by biased recrui…

Can you share a little more what you did specifically to find female candidates?

[deleted]

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

#216

Post by kipchak » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #147

kipchak wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Referencing D. Schmitts article referenced in the BBC article, he's quoted as saying >"that using someone's sex to work out what you think their personality will be like is "like surgically operating with an axe"." Being phrased by the article as a dismissal of Damore, along with G. Rippon's statements However in the article Schmitt is quoted from, he writes that >"Culturally universal sex differences in personal val…

The jump here in the data being displayed is that it is making a correlation between sex differences and bachelor's degree demographics. Very little in that rhetoric actually has logical sense such that we know that we are missing(usually) at least close to two decades of cultural and social conditioning before the bachelors degree. That's plenty of time to systematically condition women against specific fields.

One way to try and get around that issue may be to compare cultures with high Gender Equality Index scores or some similar metric versus those with lower scores but otherwise similar. Presumably the closer to parity those years before university are the more some other difference, if any, would be suggested.

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

#217

Post by jiveturkey » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:56 PM UTC

Is it a Microsoft Tay problem?

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

#218

Post by GVIrish » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

macinjosh wrote: post #194

Marazan wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was an untapped market of engineers you'd better believe every tech company would be taking advantage of it. That's exactly the same argument used to justify every regressive policy. If x was true then rational y action would happen. But that's the poo tof racism and sexism rational y action doesn't happen due to the -ism.

Do you really think white men care so much about keeping down other groups of people that they would prioritize it over making more money and having more access to good workers? That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

The whole point being made is that prejudice/bigotry is not rational. Just look at the phenomenon of redlining. Black home buyers from certain areas were absolutely prevented from acquiring mortgages even though it would have been a source of profit for local banks. There are people out there who won't hire female candidates in technical fields due to the misguided belief that 'women aren't good at math/science'.

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

#219

Post by zimablue » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

arandr0x wrote: post #214

Dirlewanger wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's taking a little longer than it should, but people are finally starting to realize that the actual reason there aren't as many women in software is because they've chosen not to be. They're wired differently and therefore have different interests.

I see this argument a lot but your exposition is less inflammatory than most. Please note this: when you tell a mixed-gender group of people that all women are "wired" to not like programming, you are telling the women who do like programming (which, let's be real, is most of them on Hacker News) that they're in effect not real women (or defective women, in an engineering sense). Or that they don't count. Since you'r…

"Since you're presumably not a woman, and they are, they object to your seeming to be taking it upon yourself to tell them what a woman is."

That idea is complete poison. In a debate where you're both completely uninformed, the anecdotal evidence of experience is relevant. In any discussion where reason, numbers, research are involved, the gender/race of the person making the argument is irrelevant to the argument. This current idea that only women can talk about female issues, only X about X is pre-enlightenment tribalism.

It presupposes conflict between the tribes too. If in my philosophy I believe that through reason and evidence I can understand your point of view and experiences,there's the possibility of agreement. If you really believe that I can never talk about issues affecting your tribe, or arrive at reason to an underlying truth, there's no point in talking. We might as well just fight to see whose tribe can impose power on whose.

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

#220

Post by beat » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

sol_remmy wrote: post #212

beat wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to be deliberate or conscious. It can be incidental. Or maybe women just aren't as smart as men.

No body thinks that. You're way outside the overton window. Why is the health care field heavily biased in favor or female nurses and doctors? Are women smarter than men when it comes to biology/anatomy?

You're right, nobody thinks men are smarter than women. And it isn't true.

So, let's think about why we see gender roles in employment. Why are there so few women software engineers? One possible explanation is that women just aren't smart enough. If you don't believe that (and I don't), then you need another explanation. Maybe it's because of sexism. But if you don't want to believe it's sexism (as the OP implied), then what is it? They're not too dumb, and the hiring process isn't sexist, so why? And that's where hands come up empty.

That leads to nonsense like the person on this thread who said women are "wired differently", which presumably makes them less suitable. Which is just a polite way of saying women are too dumb to program, without facing the reality that that's exactly it means.