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

#231

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:11 PM UTC

zimablue wrote: post #219

arandr0x wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by jonny_eh » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:13 PM UTC

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…

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

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

#233

Post by hnbroseph » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #220

sol_remmy wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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),…

> And that's where hands come up empty.

there seems to be a presupposition here that the the 'natural' proportion of women software engineers is 50%.

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

#234

Post by MetalGuru » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #146

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.

They all stopped joining up around 1985. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

What came first? Was the cast of Revenge of the Nerds all males because nerds were males and art was depicting reality, or did only men start becoming nerds become this movie had an all-male cast? I get being envious of people who had a head start with computers and feeling behind. I had zero coding experience before my first CS class in college. It sucked, but I grinded through it. It's relatively easy to catch up with determination. Probably going to be an unpopular opinion.

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

#235

Post by naasking » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #146

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.

They all stopped joining up around 1985. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

I think you mean that boatloads more men started signing up and drowned out female recruitment which plodded along at the original pace.

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

#236

Post by deegles » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

jonny_eh wrote: post #232

gambler wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

There was a company meeting one year at Amazon when they proudly announced that men and women were paid within 1-2% of each other for the same roles. It completely missed the point which you raise.

I want to see reports of average tenure and time between promotions by gender. I suspect that the reason we don't see those published is that the numbers are damning.

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

#237

Post by core-questions » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

xarill wrote: post #187

If the gender was passed as a "feature" in the machine learning model, then the company may have been biased. If not, then the majority of the women's CVs were inferior. This important information is not present in the article.

This entire article is a strong hint that the AI system simply picked the better resumes, where better = more likely to get hired, exactly as it was designed to do. The fact that more men than women satisfy these requirements should come as a surprise to precisely nobody.

Fact is, there are more men than women working in tech, especially seriously hard-core stuff like these big companies need. This is most likely out of their own personal volition, and no matter how much outreach we do, this is likely to stay the case for generations.

Of course, that's also an egregiously wrongthink position to take. Double plus ungood.

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

#238

Post by naasking » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:30 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #206

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.

But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago. Are women today "wired differently" from their mothers? Single-generation changes in behavior aren't genetic. They're social.

> But there are fewer women in software now than there were 30 years ago.

That's not true. Firstly, it's more like 40-50 years ago.

Secondly, there are far more women doing software development, but the gender ratio is dramatically different.

Thirdly, that's because male interest exploded with the advent of personal computing the 80s.

Lastly, "programming" as a profession used to be regarded as an offshot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women.

The facts around women in STEM are polluted with a lot of bizarre narratives.

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

#239

Post by bcheung » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

lalaland1125 wrote: post #40

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 number of women and men in the data set shouldn't matter (algorithms learn that even if there was 1 woman, if she was hired then it will be positive about future woman candidates). This is incorrect. The key thing to keep in mind is that they are not just predicting who is a good candidate, they are also ranking by the certainty of their prediction. Lower numbers of female candidates could plausibly lead to low…

How did you control for these things? Wondering what patterns there are that people use to prevent social discrimination.

Seems challenging since much of AI, especially classification, is essentially a discrimination algorithm.

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

#240

Post by maym86 » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

sanitycheck wrote: post #63

Given that Amazon is so far unable to successfully recommend any product which I actually want, even given the vast dataset of my Amazon purchase history, I am not remotely surprised that their engineers can't successfully develop a people recommendation engine either.

- If you hired this male candidate you may be interested in this identical male candidate.