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Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

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71–80 of 108 posts

Re: Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most companies hiring anyone requires some form of prostration to HR, so a little extra work to hire a white male is not going to slow anyone down. A friend of mine works in a large organization in which the head passed down a rule that only women would be hired for positions 'unless' the only available qualified candidate happened to be male. Can you guess what happened? It hasn't increased the relative number of…

The thing kinda is, that it's not only male/female thing, but race's also involved. Biases biases and biases. I think we should try to reach equal opportunity by providing access to edu, mentors maybe, an ability to prove themselves, not this kind of "discrimination".

Exactly, it sets anyone up to failure that would only slightly be under suspicion to have profited from these decisions. Not only by judgement from others, it also undermines the faith of the candidates themselves.

Re: Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one gender really did provide more 'value once hired', would it be reasonable for the AI to favour them?

How much more value? Suppose men were providing $10 in additional value over the time they work for you. That's barely even worth a Starbucks gift card, the sort of thing you probably give away to people who guess the number of marbles in a jar at a company mandatory fun event. You definitely shouldn't hire James rather than Deborah because of an average $10 gender difference unless they are literally interchangeable…

If you are in a gunfight, would you rather have a slight advantage?

You also need to consider the risks and circumstances, sometimes you want every tiny edge possible.

Re: Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have quotas we need to fill. Hiring a white male is basically a nonstarter without prostrating yourself before HR

Depending on what country you are in, this is illegal no? Not hiring someone based on their ethnicity who is otherwise qualified/the best candidate is racial discrimination, regardless of what that ethnicity is.

In Brazil this is illegal, but when I saw this happening and told the government about it, I got an e-mail from a female judge, saying that hiring only women is fine because it "corrects the distortions", despite it being against the constitution... This is anecdote but I can say from personal experience that companies can get away with it.

Re: Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

#74
post #39

Original paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.08910.pdf The entire premise of the research relies on the fact that the resume samples were well matched: in other words, the quality of male candidates was equal to that of female counterparts. In the paper, it says Specifically, we perform 1-1 matching without replacement such that for each male resume, we find a female resume that is within 2 years of experience, has the…

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Re: Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

#75

FWIW at least at the company I work this gives women an advantage. I get a nice bonus for anyone I recruit but recruiting a woman also increases my managers KPI.

We have quotas we need to fill. Hiring a white male is basically a nonstarter without prostrating yourself before HR

That sucks to hear as a white male but I still put the responsibility on myself. I should be so good at my job that they don't care that I'm a white male.

Re: Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much more value? Suppose men were providing $10 in additional value over the time they work for you. That's barely even worth a Starbucks gift card, the sort of thing you probably give away to people who guess the number of marbles in a jar at a company mandatory fun event. You definitely shouldn't hire James rather than Deborah because of an average $10 gender difference unless they are literally interchangeable…

If you are in a gunfight, would you rather have a slight advantage? You also need to consider the risks and circumstances, sometimes you want every tiny edge possible.

Sure, you spend as long as you like figuring out how best to achieve the slight advantage, meanwhile I shoot you in the head.

Analysis paralysis, figuring out what to do costs time and time is expensive so you should avoid this unless you've got a good reason to expect it actually matters and you believe you can actually do it correctly.

Re: Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

#77
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on what country you are in, this is illegal no? Not hiring someone based on their ethnicity who is otherwise qualified/the best candidate is racial discrimination, regardless of what that ethnicity is.

In Brazil this is illegal, but when I saw this happening and told the government about it, I got an e-mail from a female judge, saying that hiring only women is fine because it "corrects the distortions", despite it being against the constitution... This is anecdote but I can say from personal experience that companies can get away with it.

I was horrified to find this [0] written in law for my country:

> Appropriate measures aimed at achieving true equality are not regarded as discriminatory.

[0] https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1996/1498_1498_1498/en#ar...

Re: Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

#78
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the only way. They want you to think it is. Don't let them break you.

ha that's a hoot. What a horrible injustice for an HR team to try and bring some diversity to a company that mostly hired white males. If white males weren't so busy looking for drinking buddies under the guise of a "culture fit" for the last 2 decades this wouldn't be a thing. Diversity stats for our industry are a boondoggle, most of the diversity is concentrated in a few large companies, and it takes the bare mini…

> What a horrible injustice for an HR team to try and bring some diversity to a company that mostly hired white males.

White people are under represented at tech companies in USA. Only Asians are over represented. The only reason to discriminate against white people there is that you hate white people. White people are less under represented than black people, true, but white people are still under represented.

Re: Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

#80
On the importance of de-gendering the recruitment process, I have a parallel to submit with a discipline I know well, the professional classical music industry.

A few decades ago, it was commonly thought that the brain of women couldn't understand music. "Women have other preferences," "Their brains are not made for that." If it reminds you of some rhetoric seen here and there, trust your instincts.

Here is what happened in the 70s, using extracts from the book "Blindspot":

"In 1970, fewer than 10 percent of the instrumentalists in America's major symphony orchestras were women, and women made up less than 20 percent of new hires."

"Starting in the 1970s, several major American symphony orchestras experimented with a new procedure that involved interposing a screen between the auditioning instrumentalists and the committee, leaving the applicants audible but not visible to the judges."

"The next twenty years provided interesting evidence. After the adoption of blind auditions, the proportion of women hired by major symphony orchestras doubled—from 20 percent to 40 percent."

Fun fact: those blind auditions didn't start because of gender ethics; they began because the classical music industry was rife with clannishness and nepotism at all levels, which gave the incitive for orchestras to limit the impact from influential professors.

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