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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

#341

Post by zaksoup »

hahan wrote: post #336

Call me cynical but I found it amusing that no one points out the fact that engineering work is laborious and dry to say the least for most people. That's the reason why there are so few people who have other options, females, upper middle class people, people of means, in the scene. There are so many lowish paid low status unsought for sectors where majority workers are male, say janitors in Universities, why I neve…

Cynical, or wrong? There's a clear history of women in software engineering when it was considered a low-class low-skill job. The first "programmers" in the modern sense of the word were women at NASA. The lead software developer for Apollo 11 was a woman. There's so much evidence to suggest that there is far more at play here than simply "engineering is laborious and dry [so women must not want to do the work]" that I'm willing to state it falls under wikipedia's citing rules for globally known knowledge: I don't need to cite that the capital of France is Paris any more than I need to cite this.

This is the same line of already-refuted reasoning behind the "I'm just asking questions" in the infamous Google Memo.

To answer my original, rhetorical, question: It's not cynical. It's wrong.

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

#342

Post by s73v3r_ »

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,…

"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?"

Nobody is saying that the biases was caused because it was created by men who didn't want to hire women. That's a fear-mongering straw man.

What people are saying is that there was bias in the training data selected, and so the algorithm exacerbated that bias. Thus, being a cautionary tale about the training data you feed to these things.

" If there was an untapped market of engineers you'd better believe every tech company would be taking advantage of it."

You're assuming rationality where there really is no cause to do so.

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

#343

Post by s73v3r_ »

paavoova wrote: post #257
hnbroseph wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a rather curious question... what prompted it?

The parent post? Evidently, for whatever reason, male applicants and coworkers are a problem for their organization, so they go out of their way and invest in "additional resources" to hire female candidates from the hiring pool. They're not hiring on merit, but on gender. How exactly do you hire for female candidates without discriminating against the "overwhelming" body of male applicants? I would be really interes…

You start looking in different places for your applicants.

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

#344

Post by b_tterc_p »

gambler wrote: post #224
fuscy wrote: post #25

The eye opening thing here is not that the AI failed, but why it failed. At start the AI is like a baby, it doesn't know anything or have any opinions. By teaching it using a set of data, in this case a set of resumes and the outcome then it can form an opinion. The AI becoming biased tells that the "teacher" was biased also. So actually Amazon's recruiting process seems to be a mess with the technical skills on the…

The article didn't specify how they labeled resumes for training. You're assuming that it was based on whether or not the candidate was hire. Nobody with an iota of experience in machine learning would do something like that. (For obvious reasons: you can't tell from your data whether people you did not hire were truly bad.) A far more reasonable way would be to take resumes of people who were hired and train the mod…

A reasonable assumption but, in practice, false. Many companies believe (perhaps correctly) that their hiring system is good. Using hiring outcomes would be a reasonable dependent variable, especially if supply is lower than demand, performance is difficult to measure, or there’s a huge surplus of applications which need to be cut down to a smaller number of human assessed resumes.

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

#345

Post by beat »

zimablue wrote: post #328
beat wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The job of the developer has changed massively". What, pray tell, has changed that made the job more attractive to men, and less attractive to women? You need to be able to answer that question if you're going to make a causal assertion.

I wasn't around two generations ago to make the comparison but I imagine that with the higher income has come much higher expectations that you'll be in the office for 12 hours a day and weekends. You also have much higher wealth in western nations which correlates with higher ability to seek jobs that fit your preferences. Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions. There…

Nonsense. I don't know where you work, but where I work, 12 hour days and weekends are clearly not the norm. We put in 40 hour weeks like any other profession.

I first learned to program 35 years ago. It wasn't fundamentally different then. Hell, we still use programming languages that were in wide use 35 years ago, like C and the unix shell. The kind of thinking required hasn't changed.

So, based on my 35 years of experience, the conditions and the job are basically the same. So again, I challenge you - how is the job different now?

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

#346

Post by _Tev »

zaksoup wrote: post #341
hahan wrote: post #336

Call me cynical but I found it amusing that no one points out the fact that engineering work is laborious and dry to say the least for most people. That's the reason why there are so few people who have other options, females, upper middle class people, people of means, in the scene. There are so many lowish paid low status unsought for sectors where majority workers are male, say janitors in Universities, why I neve…

Cynical, or wrong? There's a clear history of women in software engineering when it was considered a low-class low-skill job. The first "programmers" in the modern sense of the word were women at NASA. The lead software developer for Apollo 11 was a woman. There's so much evidence to suggest that there is far more at play here than simply "engineering is laborious and dry [so women must not want to do the work]" that…

> There's so much evidence to suggest that there is far more at play here than simply "engineering is laborious and dry [so women must not want to do the work]" that I'm willing to state it falls under wikipedia's citing rules for globally known knowledge: I don't need to cite that the capital of France is Paris any more than I need to cite this.

What about citations proving that "software engineering when it was considered a low-class low-skill job" is the same profession as the programming in the past 30years. Or at least that it has the same difficulty / processes.

Btw usage of phrases like "clear history", "so much evidence" (especially when you cite one(!) arguable data point), "already-refuted" does not convince anyone about you being right. It is at best annoying.

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

#347

Post by hahan »

zaksoup wrote: post #341
hahan wrote: post #336

Call me cynical but I found it amusing that no one points out the fact that engineering work is laborious and dry to say the least for most people. That's the reason why there are so few people who have other options, females, upper middle class people, people of means, in the scene. There are so many lowish paid low status unsought for sectors where majority workers are male, say janitors in Universities, why I neve…

Cynical, or wrong? There's a clear history of women in software engineering when it was considered a low-class low-skill job. The first "programmers" in the modern sense of the word were women at NASA. The lead software developer for Apollo 11 was a woman. There's so much evidence to suggest that there is far more at play here than simply "engineering is laborious and dry [so women must not want to do the work]" that…

While I agree with the early days female programmers history thing, I'd like to point one thing you've neglected, that programming work 60 yrs ago is not comparable or even relevant to that of today. They are of different nature. What's farther from the reality is , back those days programming was not particularly losing paying or low status, I'd say it was elite. After all, most people then had no access to tertiary education, let alone computers.

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

#348

Post by fizwhiz »

fizwhiz wrote: post #322
jonny_eh wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Men are promoted quicker, and more often, than women.

citation needed

downvoters, please explain. The statement makes sense when you look at it in tech where there are more men than women. So it may appear that more men are getting promoted compared to their women counterparts. But that doesn't mean men >>> women, it's just statistics at play.

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

#349

Post by skywhopper »

hahan wrote: post #336

Call me cynical but I found it amusing that no one points out the fact that engineering work is laborious and dry to say the least for most people. That's the reason why there are so few people who have other options, females, upper middle class people, people of means, in the scene. There are so many lowish paid low status unsought for sectors where majority workers are male, say janitors in Universities, why I neve…

You're saying that software engineers are in the role because they have no other option? No upper-middle-class people in the position? What are you talking about?

You're missing the point anyway. The article made it pretty clear that this AI amplified biases humans already have about women applicants to tech positions. Stating your own biases about women make no sense to the topic, or to the argument you seem to be trying to make.

Janitors are worth talking about as well (women in the same job usually have a different title with less authority and less pay), but high-status, highly-paid, highly influential jobs are where it's most important to avoid bias, and so we talk about those more.

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

#350

Post by hahan »

skywhopper wrote: post #349
hahan wrote: post #336

Call me cynical but I found it amusing that no one points out the fact that engineering work is laborious and dry to say the least for most people. That's the reason why there are so few people who have other options, females, upper middle class people, people of means, in the scene. There are so many lowish paid low status unsought for sectors where majority workers are male, say janitors in Universities, why I neve…

You're saying that software engineers are in the role because they have no other option? No upper-middle-class people in the position? What are you talking about? You're missing the point anyway. The article made it pretty clear that this AI amplified biases humans already have about women applicants to tech positions. Stating your own biases about women make no sense to the topic, or to the argument you seem to be t…

You're saying that software engineers are in the role because they have no other option? No upper-middle-class people in the position? What are you talking about?

There are enthusiastic people who start with enthusiasm and can keep that enthusiasm. Most begin with practical concerns. And most of those who don't begin with stay with. he

And yes, rich people, upper echelon, people of means are rare in the industry

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