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Job Applicant Resumes Are Effectively Impossible to De-Gender

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

#21

Post by icare_1er »

skinkestek wrote: post #15
8lall0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally the worst.

No, compared to what I hear from other places there is no hate against men compared to what sometimes get described here; it is just that women are preferred and get slightly higher pay on average if my contacts in management are to be believed, but keeping women on board is a priority and also they pay us men very fairly.

"Positive" discrimination is the worst, and makes it pretty clear to everyone on the floor, that the person has been put where he/she is for reasons that have nothing to do with how he/she performs at work. I've seen it first hand, and it was quite embarrassing to watch a female member appointed to a specific committee just for the sake of having a women, that no one listened to, that clearly had no business there, etc... People deciding what women employment rate and where, should be, reminds me a lot of certain communist bureaucrats deciding what the GDP of the country should be and passing a law saying "this year, the GDP will be x"... you just cannot fake reality.

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

#22

Post by Aeolun »

c0balt wrote: post #14
wayanon wrote: post #11

Automation should be removed from the hiring process.

But to which level? Basic automation, i.e. sorting by proficency is not really done better by a human than machine. The problem doesn't lie in automation but how we apply it. Don't blame the tool, blame the user. I think there is a lot of room for removing overautomation and creating transparency. Though just outright abandoning automation would hurt even more since human routines are even harder to evaluate/ make tr…

If you have too many CV’s to look at, you can simply trash a random set (or automatically send a rejection email), then look at the remainder. You should still have roughly the same ratio of skilled candidates.

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

#23

Post by vnorilo »

I'm not sure gender inequality can be solved by some magic machine making gender disappear. Rather we can progress by making inequality visible and challenging it: only when attitudes change we will slowly improve.

The HN crowd might like Lauren Klein's approach to this via data science [1] - I do.

1: https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/

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

#24

Post by Zababa »

Link to the actual paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.08910.pdf

Edit after having read it: It's short and easy to read, I would suggest reading it instead of the article linked. I think that more work should be needed before making suggestions. For example, is there a correlation between the "number of words" and the gendering of a resume? Maybe something like "I was the manager of the soap team for 3 years, during which sales increased by 25.6%" compared to "2012-2015: soap team manager". Though this convey less informations. Maybe a KPI box for each job?

Another thing that I would have liked would be to compare that to what actual recruiters can do. If a simple model can do 0.75 and a regular recruiter 0.53, it's not the same as if a recruiter does 0.92.

Lastly, the "list of gender indicating words" seems really small. Just 26 words for 348k resume.

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

#25

Post by etripe »

c0balt wrote: post #14
wayanon wrote: post #11

Automation should be removed from the hiring process.

But to which level? Basic automation, i.e. sorting by proficency is not really done better by a human than machine. The problem doesn't lie in automation but how we apply it. Don't blame the tool, blame the user. I think there is a lot of room for removing overautomation and creating transparency. Though just outright abandoning automation would hurt even more since human routines are even harder to evaluate/ make tr…

What kind of proficiency do you mean, exactly? To me, the concept sounds too nebulous for a machine to analyse, as it needs precise instructions/criteria.

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

#28

Post by bellyfullofbac »

skinkestek wrote: post #18
geraldwhen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We happily take anyone qualified and I get my bonus. But as mentioned, percentage of female employees is a KPI and it makes my boss looks good and it makes the CEO happy in all hands meetings.

My properties ensure that I won't face quotas that would be a barrier for emplyoment (well maybe my gender, I'm male), so, I'm just curious, so what if there's one position to fill, the male candidate scores 60%, and the female one scores 58% (using my hypothetical ranking system which actually works and is fair, etc, etc), so just slightly lower. Would your company pick the female candidate in this case?

I guess answering this question "the wrong way" would get a lot of butthurt people showing up to this thread, so feel free to not answer.

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

#30

Post by shultays »

skinkestek wrote: post #18
geraldwhen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We happily take anyone qualified and I get my bonus. But as mentioned, percentage of female employees is a KPI and it makes my boss looks good and it makes the CEO happy in all hands meetings.

I am an engineer that involves in hiring (technical interviews, assignment reading (we have a home assignment for candidates)) and I have a couple experiences in which I felt like my decision was overruled.

One was a female applicant. I was reading her assignment and felt like it was subpar and my decision was a thumbs down. Later we went forward with the application to the technical interviews because it was a female and we "really needed to hire one" (to be clear, I didn't even know it was a female until my decision is overruled. We don't receive CVs or names while reviewing home assignments)

The other was a minority from a different country. My decision was thumbs down because the applicant basically lied in his CV about his past experience. HR overruled that by saying something like "...in his culture it is hard for people to admit their weaknesses..." and to top it off "we don't have anyone in our company from country X!" and he got hired.

So yea, positive reinforcement means you are not really looking for qualification and most things can be ignored to fill some quotas. And you won't be getting that bonus when someone else refers a minority that gets hired.

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