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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

#431
post #396
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another corollary should immediately follow: If an average woman in the industry is that much better than an average man, where are all the female-only companies? Does nobody want money in a capitalist society?

How much is 'that much'? The effect is probably small but what is more important it is not about a moved centre of (a Gaussian) distribution - but rather about a higher threshold usually used for women to pass. This is of course very much dependant on the distribution shapes and I am too lazy to make a thorough analysis - but: Let's assume that on average females were 10% more efficient programmers - but with the eff…

Sorry for the late reply, I was away from civilization.

I think that depends on how your hiring process looks like in general. You might, for example do a benevolent (from a certain POV) discrimination and simply start filtering applicants with something like a naive 20-line Python script that matches applicant names against female names from a dictionary and pushes them to the top of your applicant stack, so to speak.

And there are less tangible or directly measurable, but nonetheless important benefits to hiring women for a business: You can get free publicity and marketing if you run a successful women-only shop, there is a significant demand in the liberal media for female success stories and you can ride that wave.

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

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A subtle point you may have missed, amazon knew about and accounted for the gender bias, the scrapped it because of all of the biases that they couldn't identify and were leery of. Most of your suggestions seem to be solving for the known biases, which I believe they did. Also knowing some people who worked on this, they were VERY cognizant of re-encoding biases from the start of the project, it was one of the main r…

I did not at all get from the article "amazon knew about and accounted for the gender bias". "Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms. But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory." I read that as a very different statement - as written, Amazon corrected two specific instances of keyword gender bias by h…

I believe the system was trained on successful candidates. And Successful means: They were retained and likely promoted after hire over the next 3 years.

If they only trained on who was hired they wouldn't really know if those were good hires.

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

#433
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that's where hands come up empty. Maybe anti-male sexism prevalent in the health care and education fields is causing women to prefer those fields. Fix the sexism in health care/education. Elementary teachers should be 50% men. Nurses should be 50% men. Instead those fields are 90%(!) women! That is a HUGE level of bias and discrimination

Possibility 1: Female-dominated fields discriminate against men. Possibility 2: Those fields are female-dominated because they can't get into male-dominated fields. So what do the pay and prestige look like for female fields, vs male fields? Well, take medical. Nurses (low prestige, low pay) are >90% female. Doctors (high prestige, high pay) are about 70% male. This suggests to me that there's indeed a huge level of…

> So what do the pay and prestige look like for female fields, vs male fields?

What is the payoff for pay and prestige and is it the same between genders?

I think the overwhelming evidence suggests it is not the same and that women value different things than men.

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