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Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

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Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#31

Post by Thorentis »

fighterpilot wrote: post #11
vmception wrote: post #3

I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not access the economy or capital or literacy. Racial discrimination also occurs. A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who exper…

99 percent correlation is too high and contradicts the spirit of the statement that it's more class bias than race bias. If the correlation is 99 percent then they're nearly completely identical

Correlation doesn't mean causation. If the cause is class bias, and you spend all your energy trying to make people more tolerant of other races, when actually they have no racist feelings whatsoever but have terrible class prejudices, then all your efforts are in vain. Trying to conflate the two things just because a correlation might exist is the problem OP is talking about.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#32

Post by rsa25519 »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #25
howeyc wrote: post #7

I've always wondered with things like this, could it be possible to make all interaction "text-based" until final stage? Specifically for hiring: What if applicants submitted resumes, but the name and school they attended are replaced with numbers. Then throughout the interview process all interactions were text-based and they were addressed by this number. Then offer/acceptance is based on merit (hopefully) and not…

I have wished for a system like this forever. I have no qualms over a test. We all need to take tests. Give all applicants a few written tests on the job they are hiring for. The people who do well on the test are given the job on a probationary basis. I might even exclude references, and schooling?

> The people who do well on the test are given the job on a probationary basis.

This sounds terrible. Not everyone can take tests well (even if they strongly understand the content), and few people can afford to accept a job that's probationary.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#33

Post by disabled »

intergalplan wrote: post #20
bitwize wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't take into account things like accent, which does count. Many people native to the Boston area looking to get high-paying jobs (esp. in tech) work on breaking their Boston accents to sound higher class.

Practically all US regional accents, especially if thick, register as "lower" than Standard American English spoken with a generic or newscaster accent.

There is no Standard US English accent. Even people from the US Pacific Northwest speak with an accent.

Interestingly, there are AI apps to make your English accent [1] more mainstream, but the fact is that judging a person by their accent is xenophobic.

Anyways, I practice my pronunciation for a foreign language using speech recognition software/apps.

[1] Class Is in Session: AI App Schools on English Pronunciation: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/06/26/class-is-in-session...

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#34

Post by hn8788 »

Doesn't suprise me. My wife is from a rural town in NC, and was told by her high school teachers that she needed to lose her southern accent if she wanted to be taken seriously in college. When she was working on or master's degree in Maryland, a writing professor commented "you speak and write so well, I never would have guessed you're from the south". That kind of discrimination is very prevalent in academia and media in general, but nobody cares.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#35

Post by fishtoaster »

Key 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 status.

So while I don't fault the study here, it's not clear that this really demonstrates what the title says ("shows bias in hiring"). It shows bias if you tell a hiring manager they need to make a hiring decision based on no actual interviewing. It'd be like if a candidate came in for an interview, made 60 seconds of small talk, and then the hiring manager had to immediately make an offer. And, yeah, I'm not surprised that in a situation like that, hiring managers make decisions based on the slimmest of signals, amplifying class-based biases. Would they have way less bias if given any real signal about a candidate's fitness for a job? That's not shown one way or another according to this press release.

That said, I generally do believe the thesis here (that speech patterns influence class perceptions which significantly bias hiring), even if I'm not convinced that this particular study shows that.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#36

Post by njarboe »

rsa25519 wrote: post #32
hellbannedguy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have wished for a system like this forever. I have no qualms over a test. We all need to take tests. Give all applicants a few written tests on the job they are hiring for. The people who do well on the test are given the job on a probationary basis. I might even exclude references, and schooling?

> The people who do well on the test are given the job on a probationary basis. This sounds terrible. Not everyone can take tests well (even if they strongly understand the content), and few people can afford to accept a job that's probationary.

In the US at least, at-will employment means that all jobs are "probationary".

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#37

Post by TameAntelope »

twic wrote: post #15
vmception wrote: post #3

I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not access the economy or capital or literacy. Racial discrimination also occurs. A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who exper…

> A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority There was a study on that recently: https://osf.io/tdkf3/

I've got a lot of problems with this work, but I think I can best summarize my issues with the question: Who are the "Democratic elites"? A list of "Democratic politicians" and quotes from them is given, but I'm curious if that's the full summation of who the "elites" are, or if there are other, thus far unnamed "elites".

I can't think of a better example, but this reminds me of some of the papers on skull size from the late 19th/early 20th century (Mortonites? A bit fuzzy, it's been a minute). There was an undeniable correlation, but it took decades to undo the false causation that was implied (not directly stated in that paper or this one), and that damage still has not been fully undone, despite the heroic lifelong work of Franz Boas and others.

This paper needed to discuss why racial framing isn't persuasive, and it doesn't do that. The whole, "We should trick white people into being kinder to minorities" argument is, frankly, insulting to white people, among many other not-very-noble things. White people should be able to hear arguments about racial inequality without losing their collective minds.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#39

Post by throwawayboise »

hnxs wrote: post #27
heterodoxxed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two are so incredibly intertwined given our history that it's hard to separate them. While I think talking about race without talking about class is a huge mistake, it's also a mistake to think that class in a way that doesn't take race into consideration. For instance, AAVE is seen as "low class" despite there being plenty of speakers of it who are not lower class at all. The kind of racial reductionism we've se…

I think class is primarily dictated by three things on a superficial level, e.g ten minutes or less of a first interaction with someone: - How you speak - How you dress - How physically attractive you are, specifically in regards to things like height, fitness, and angular features. Skin color takes a backseat to these factors in the modern era

I'd say it's more like 10 seconds, maybe even less than that, but I agree.

Re: Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech

#40

Post by fighterpilot »

booleandilemma wrote: post #28
fighterpilot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that but race and gender blind admissions will lead to a huge number of East Asian males which won't be tolerated.

Why would it lead to a huge number of East Asian males?

Universities use an unblinded selection process as a way to intentionally handicap East Asians (and to a slightly lesser extent, white people). Their proportion in enrolment has been trending down steadily over time and has converged to be nearly identical across all the top universities (except for Caltech) which suggests they're all silently colluding (by copying each others' quotas) to keep the Asian enrolment percentage at precisely the depressed X percent.

Private companies don't have such explicit Asian quotas in place but the spirit of affirmative action is to handicap Asian men and white men in the interview process. Google does this by making the interview process easier for non majority groups. If you can't apply the handicap then it follows that the majority groups proportions will increase.

Of course, the counter argument is that implicit bias and so on will mean the opposite will occur. But empirically that isn't what has happened in universities, and so I have no reason to expect it to happen in private hiring either.

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