Does it apply in tech space? I've seen so many hires barely speaking any English. Ultimately what gets the deal is how cheap one can sell themselves, then the managers don't care about the rest.
Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
231–240 of 265 posts
Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
President Lyndon Johnson said >If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. It does not just apply to dynamics between white and non white people, it applies to all people, even within tribes of the same skin color, and probably even other tribal species.
He didn’t make it up either - the French government did exactly that about 200 years ago in Haiti. They introduced apartheid for the purpose of sowing discord between people and undermining the independence movement.
An even older example is Indians and the caste system. I would even posit it greatly assisted Britain in being able to pilfer the subcontinent from halfway around the world with a fraction of the population.
Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another perspective is that a lot of bias isn't "I don't like X people", but rather "I feel X people are disproportionately Y, and I don't like Y". Objective data that this X person isn't Y seems like a good way to (1) reduce the harm of the bias in the short term and (2) hopefully diminish the bias over time, given enough objective data to fix their biased priors via observation. If fixing people's biases via object…
> Another perspective is that a lot of bias isn't "I don't like X people", but rather "I feel X people are disproportionately Y, and I don't like Y" Of course. But the answer to this depends on: 1. the source of the belief that 'X people tend to be Y'. 2. The truth or otherwise of that belief. 3. The source of the dislike of Y. 4. Whether or not Y is a reasonable cause for dislike. Suppose that I tell you that the mo…
Sure, but we usually group these sorts of disagreements as axiomatic disagreements, not bias.
Maybe I'm grossly naive, but I doubt that percentage wise there are many hiring managers who hold racial superiority as axiomatic.
My understanding is that hiring bias usually boils down to assumptions about aggregate intelligence, trustworthiness, and/or work ethic of groups of people. If someone thinks Swedes just aren't that smart, it's not a matter of axiomatic disagreement about if being smart is good or bad in an employee, it is something that objective data can fix. If someone is worried that black people are generally untrustworthy due to criminal pasts, that's something that they can be objectively shown to be untrue.
(Yes, I grew up in a time and place where racist/originist Sven and Ole jokes about dumb Swedes were common.)
Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
#234The article seems to be saying that the study shows that hiring managers are able to identify with not a lot of interaction candidates that are well-educated, gainfully employed and earn a high salary and unsurprisingly favors such candidates. This is not class bias - you can't just define class as that which employers care about and then accuse hiring managers of having a class bias when they understandably look for these traits.
Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
#235Is class stereotype bias accurate? I don't know. But if so then the optimal amount of actual bias may be nonzero. So does the study show the right amount of bias, too little, or too much? It wouldn't be easy to measure the correlation between classes and employee performance, but not impossible either. Lacking such data it's hard to know how to interpret such results. Of course any such bias should be deeply discount…
Swap out race and class here and see how you feel about it.
Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
#236Key bit here: > Devoid of any information about the candidates’ actual qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. Moreover, they assigned the applicants from higher social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than the candidates with lower social s…
It's worse than that - the hiring managers were accurately identifying things that matter. The article isn't saying that the hiring managers were unfairly biased, but that they were somehow able to pick up on traits (their level of education, their level of professional success) that they'd otherwise care about.
It'd be more worrying if hiring managers picked up on thing that didn't matter (their parents' level of education, controlled for their own, their parents' income level, controlled for their own, where they grew up, again, controlled for other markers of professional success) but the article isn't saying that's what the study found.
To me it sounds like they were going to come to the same conclusion no matter what. If the hiring managers were unable to identify any meaningful signals and discern better credentials from the recordings, they could've spun this as: the hiring managers, unable to discern things that matter, picked up on irrelevant cues and discriminated against people with certain irrelevant characteristics (it's inevitable that some traits would be correlated with the hiring managers' selection). In this case, the hiring managers managed to discriminate in favor of better candidates - so they are just reframing better credentials as class.
Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, it's very credible that a general tendency will remain if other sources of information are available. The unresolved question is what weight is assigned to each preference. If a hiring decision is influenced to 0.01% by speech and accent and 99.99% by whatever you deem reasonable criteria, then what do you learn from filtering out the latter? And of course, decisions like this need not have linear behavior in r…
Isn't the existence in a more realistic hiring process of a huge weight of objective and reasonable criteria an unjustified, unlikely and politically subjective assumption? Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias, perhaps it's more reasonable to assume that most others also involve unconscious or explained-away bias? So perhaps hiring decisions are influenced 0…
> Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias
No such thing was shown in this study. The study makes no attempt to measure E(skills | social class). For all we know, the hiring managers provided an unbiased (i.e. the opposite of "irrational bias") estimate of the expected skills conditioned on the social class of the applicant, absent any other information.
Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can search my username and the word "redneck" and you'll find one. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702815
Reading the thread shows a very different story to the one in the GGP. Another poster describes the Capitol riot as a "day-out for rednecks". You say "there aren't many rednecks in San Diego" and the other poster replies to say that they believe there are a lot of 'rural conservatives' around San Diego. Then you accuse them of using a slur, although it's not really clear if you are rebuking him for calling Capitol ri…
A redneck is usually a white, working class person of meager means. This is how I've known the term growing up.
What the commenter I originally replied to was doing was using the term to refer to white people, any white person. When I pointed out that a good portion of the people in the article are from San Diego (I followed a doxxing thread on Reddit during this, nearly all of these people were business owners or people of means), another person tried to reframe the original posters context as "rural conservative". Again, pretty plainly misses the mark, and again, the people in that article are not rural at all. They live in this city, where it costs $600k to get a basic house. One of them owned a coffee shop of all businesses. I don't know about you, but I generally do not see people who call themselves rednecks opening coffee shops in the middle of a major city.
I can't speak to the frequency that this happens. The person I responded to in this thread claimed they'd never seen it, so I linked to an instance of it that I remembered.
Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Few challenge that the children of highly educated parents have higher academic achievement. As highly educated parents is strongly correlated with upper class. This is enough to make it quite likely that someone from an upper class background will be the better candidate in expectation, even if the only information you get is the socioeconomic background. We can quibble over details, but the more you dig into this t…
As shopworn as the term is, this is what is meant by "institutional racism." Racist sentiment is not necessary for people to behave in what is ultimately a racist way. I would also challenge your notion. It is true that wealth is correlated with educational achievement. But educational achievement will not, in itself, lead to someone speaking in a way that is more patrician. Is it the kind of society we want to creat…
> Is it the kind of society we want to create where you are essentially "locked in" to your parents' social position?
No, that is why interviews should look more like the ones Google performs and less like "please describe yourself, hobbies and life experiences"
Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
#240Key bit here: > Devoid of any information about the candidates’ actual qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. Moreover, they assigned the applicants from higher social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than the candidates with lower social s…
It's wild how people with different assumptions about the world can read the same thing, focus on the same part, and walk away with opposite conclusions. I read that as them trying to control for other factors and get a clean signal to demonstrate their hypothesis as a testable, verifiable, and falsifiable phenomenon. But some people apparently think that the process of isolation IS the confounding factor that produc…
> The point from my reading was all things being equal except for the subtle verbal patterns of class, the verbal patterns are a real influencing factor in outcome
No, because as other people replying to you have stated, being able to observe "other things" is the crucial difference between an actual interview and what happened in this study. Inferences about variable X, depend on whether you can observe only Y, or also A,B,C,W,Z.
Here is what an experiment measuring what you believe this one does would look like:
- Find participants with a range of skills/experience and pair up participants from low social class with participants from high social class according to skill
- Allow hiring managers to conduct realistic interview processes and grade the candidates
- Assess the bias due to social class by looking at the differences in average rating for participants in each pair. If you have enough interviews/participants, you can also estimate the size of the bias from social class as a function of applicant skill
- Issues: you do need another metric to quantify "skill" that does not rely on hiring managers performing interviews (education level, GPA, written tests, etc.)
Here is what this experiment did:
- Allow hiring managers to infer social class
- Measure the expected skill given social class assigned by the managers with no other information present
- Issues: decisions from "no other information present" and "after conducting a rigorous interview and all other (job related) things being equal" are not comparable