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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

#351

Post by hahan »

skywhopper wrote: post #349
hahan wrote: post #336

Call me cynical but I found it amusing that no one points out the fact that engineering work is laborious and dry to say the least for most people. That's the reason why there are so few people who have other options, females, upper middle class people, people of means, in the scene. There are so many lowish paid low status unsought for sectors where majority workers are male, say janitors in Universities, why I neve…

You're saying that software engineers are in the role because they have no other option? No upper-middle-class people in the position? What are you talking about? You're missing the point anyway. The article made it pretty clear that this AI amplified biases humans already have about women applicants to tech positions. Stating your own biases about women make no sense to the topic, or to the argument you seem to be t…

And of you think programming is high status, high paying, highly influential, why we import immigrants to do that ? You think the talent pool of some hundred million American people with most entensive education system is insufficient ?

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

#352

Post by njharman »

user812 wrote: post #274
HashHishBang wrote: post #117

Hold on here. This article seems to have buried a pretty important piece of information wayyy down in the middle of the text. > Gender bias was not the only issue. Problems with the data that underpinned the models’ judgments meant that unqualified candidates were often recommended for all manner of jobs, the people said. With the technology returning results almost at random, Amazon shut down the project, they said.…

The media is no longer reporting things. You can't make money with reporting. The media is actively creating narratives, and one of the narratives that people are fed nowadays is that women are victims. Men and women are pitted against each other. Due to the way the media has evolved people consume their own biases and most often just read the headlines.

No longer? Read some history, start with yellow journalism and muckraking.

Learning history will teach you more about things today than any news source.

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

#353

Post by totony »

kat wrote: post #269
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…

To note, there are more women than men in high school teaching positions, so what you're seeing might not be that STEM has a bias against women but that teaching has a bias for women (or any other out of a very big set of possible conclusions)

see: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EAG_PERS_SHARE...

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

#354

Post by zaksoup »

hahan wrote: post #347
zaksoup wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynical, or wrong? There's a clear history of women in software engineering when it was considered a low-class low-skill job. The first "programmers" in the modern sense of the word were women at NASA. The lead software developer for Apollo 11 was a woman. There's so much evidence to suggest that there is far more at play here than simply "engineering is laborious and dry [so women must not want to do the work]" that…

While I agree with the early days female programmers history thing, I'd like to point one thing you've neglected, that programming work 60 yrs ago is not comparable or even relevant to that of today. They are of different nature. What's farther from the reality is , back those days programming was not particularly losing paying or low status, I'd say it was elite. After all, most people then had no access to tertiary…

I agree that programming is very different today than it was in the 50s and 60s but I absolutely disagree that it was high paying or elite. Programming was considered a step above secretarial work[0] and women were actively encouraged to enter the field because they were “naturally suited to planning”.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi...

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

#355

Post by zaksoup »

_Tev wrote: post #346
zaksoup wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynical, or wrong? There's a clear history of women in software engineering when it was considered a low-class low-skill job. The first "programmers" in the modern sense of the word were women at NASA. The lead software developer for Apollo 11 was a woman. There's so much evidence to suggest that there is far more at play here than simply "engineering is laborious and dry [so women must not want to do the work]" that…

> There's so much evidence to suggest that there is far more at play here than simply "engineering is laborious and dry [so women must not want to do the work]" that I'm willing to state it falls under wikipedia's citing rules for globally known knowledge: I don't need to cite that the capital of France is Paris any more than I need to cite this. What about citations proving that "software engineering when it was con…

What about citations proving that programming is dry, tedious, or boring? I am under no obligation to engage a comment made in bad faith as if it wasn’t.

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

#356

Post by lalaland1125 »

ewjordan wrote: post #331
titzer wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not enough information about how their ML algorithm works, nor how large their dataset was for any of the above reasoning to be justified. Fwiw, many ranking functions do indeed take certainty into account, penalizing populations with few data points.

If they were using any sort of neural networks approach with stochastic gradient descent, the network would have to spend some "gradient juice" to cut a divot that recognizes and penalizes women's colleges and the like. It wouldn't do this just because there were fewer women in the batches, rather it would just not assign any weight to those factors. Unless they presented lots of unqualified resumes of people not in…

> It wouldn't do this just because there were fewer women in the batches, rather it would just not assign any weight to those factors.

That's exactly the issue we are talking about here. Woman's colleges would have less training data so they would get updated less. For many classes of models (such as neural networks with weight decay or common initialization schemes) this would encourage the model to be more "neutral" about women and assign predictions closer to 0.5 for them. This might not affect the overall accuracy for women (as it might not influence whether or not they go above or below 0.5), but it would cause the predictions for women to be less confident and thus have a lower ranking (closer to the middle of the pack as opposed to the top).

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

#357

Post by gspetr »

beat wrote: post #276
wetpaws wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it corelate with performance?

And how is performance measured? Aggressive behavior is considered admirable in men, and deplorable in women. Many women I know have noted comments in their performance reviews about their behavior - various words that can all be distilled to "bitchy".

And then you take your experience, connections and expertise to leave and start your own company where none of this happens.

But is that what we see in real life?

I don't have data or sources at hand, but I'd bet top dollar that F-M ratio among employees is much more lopsided in male favor among founders[0].

[0] Not using the word CEO, because that can be appointed for somewhat arbitrary reasons.

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

#358

Post by brown9-2 »

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…

This seems to assume that performance evaluation is itself free from bias.

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

#359

Post by brown9-2 »

roenxi wrote: post #318
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…

Do you have some information not present in the article? There seem to be some assumptions on the training process in your comment that are not sourced in the article. I'll don my flack jacket for this one, but based on population statistics I believe a statistically significant number of women have children. A plausible hypothesis is that a typical female candidate is at a 9 month disadvantage against male employees…

Does Amazon give 9 months of parental leave, or are you saying women employees are disadvantaged for their entire pregnancy?
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