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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

#261

Post by mike22223333 »

komali2 wrote: post #114
thoughtexplorer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if people would just let them. People do let them. You can't force what people are interested in and you can't let in that which does not exist. In fact many places in tech give preference to women applicants, because they don't apply often and the companies want more women. They're just rare to see. :( There's no grand conspiracy. The truth is much less exciting: Women and men have different preferences, generally…

There's no actual evidence to suggest preference for career type is inherent to being a woman or man. There's plenty showing that women right now have different interests of men, but the cause can easily be societal conditioning - i.e., something that can be fixed.

Sweden tried it. It failed.

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

#262

Post by crimsonalucard »

Once I worked for a startup selling fresh human baby milk to mothers who couldn't produce milk. I was contracted to write a supply side AI that would find people willing to sell the milk they produced to us. The AI had the exact opposite bias as the one in this article... it showed extreme bias against men.

I also wrote a similar AI for finding surrogate pregnancy candidates and it also showed bias against men.

Goes to show how AI can fail and be incredibly sexist.

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

#263

Post by sol_remmy »

arandr0x wrote: post #180
guitarbill wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully we can at least agree that those questions are limited in effectiveness, and often have no actual relation to how good an engineer is. It varies of course. Sometimes, they seem more like a secret handshake you need to memorize to get into the boys club than actually useful engineering. Who hasn't had to revise some of these before applying for a job 3 years out of college? What it does do is effectively exc…

There is an interesting tangent in this thread where we can wonder what it would reveal if "coding interview" type CS tests were administered along with standard IQ tests (or the application included SAT scores). Do coding tests predict work performance better or worse than an IQ test? If worse, are they merely "culture fit" bias filters meant to retain the ingroup? If better, is it because culture fit actually matte…

Using an IQ test in order to hire is actually illegal. If only the laws were that simple..

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

#264

Post by beat »

hnbroseph wrote: post #233
beat wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

There's a presupposition that the natural distribution of intelligence is gender-neutral. Which suggests that the unequal distribution of software engineers by gender has a cause other than intelligence.

So what is the cause, then? Is it biological, or social, or random chance? "Random" doesn't seem likely, especially given how many other professions are male-dominated, and the relative economic and social power of those roles, compared to female-dominated professions.

"Biological", if it doesn't map directly to intelligence, needs another cause - something that can be measured. Do you have a suggestion for this? I don't.

"Social" is the most likely reason, but how is "social" different from "discrimination"? How do you define a social cause for men dominating the industry that can't be readily interpreted as discriminating against women?

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

#265

Post by komali2 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #210
komali2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the Damore argument. Besides the fact that his psuedo science has been summarily handled[0], to consider his argument you then have to equally consider the possibility of sexism in academia pressuring women to not study these subjects and societal pressure their whole lives pressuring them to not persue these career paths. There's also the idea that lack of women scientist "heroes" can be limiting (lack of role m…

Well... why is it, then, that underrepresentation of women must suggest sexism, but the (orders of magnitude higher) overrepresentation of asians - specifically from India - doesn't suggest bias?

From a recruiter standpoint, that answer is easy - there are literally orders of magnitude more Indians applying.

So the bias against women due to decades of societal conditioning leads to less than 50/50 representation because less are applying, which companies are trying to patch by leveling the playing field, making their internal population breakdown identical to the external one.

Seeing shitloads of Indians is a passive effect of that internal/external thing - there are around 1.2 billion Indians...

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

#266

Post by crimsonalucard »

maym86 wrote: post #245
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #129

So why is it not ok that women are penalized by being statistically less likely to get an offer yet it’s just fine to penalize men on auto insurance for being statistically more likely to cause an accident?

Because men are statistically more likely to cause auto accidents. There is no evidence that women are not statistically more likely to be bad at getting good work done at companies like Amazon. It's pretty simple.

Do you have a source for your second statement?

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

#267

Post by beat »

naasking wrote: post #238
beat wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 secretar…

Okay, so TWO generations. Big deal. It still dismisses the "born that way" nonsense argument.

"'programming' as a profession used to be regarded as an offshoot of secretarial work, which was dominated by women". Which begs the question of why women dominated secretarial work (and still do), while as programming became a more respected and better paying profession, it became male-dominated.

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

#268

Post by dx87 »

hnbroseph wrote: post #230
N0RMAN wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just being female is a qualification at your workplace?

a rather curious question... what prompted it?

The person they're asking said that they dedicated a extra resources to try and hire female candidates because the office was all males. That implies that they were hiring specifically for gender, not for any specific skillset.

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

#269

Post by kat »

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,…

"Untapped market of engineers" yes it exists. The majority of my female friends with STEM degrees ended up as high school teachers. I had several older people suggest to me that teaching should be my preferred career choice because it was more flexible than a programming job (wtf...)

"every tech company would be taking advantage of it" - nope, no one is. I don't know why but my guess is its hard to admit you're doing hiring wrong, hard to hire people who think differently than you, etc.

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

#270

Post by wetpaws »

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.

Does it corelate with performance?
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