Submitted via IRC for chromas
Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women.
The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.
Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars - much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.
[...] But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.
That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.
In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools.
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, the people said.
The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Amazon’s recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the tool when searching for new hires, but never relied solely on those rankings, they said.
rinciples.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @02:18PM (1 child)
I don't dispute this, except to say there will be overlap and some individuals that buck the trend.
I did not suggest this. Regarding the influence of a patriarchy though, I will say that male fashion designers and male movie makers have a fair amount of influence on shaping female role models according to their own preferences which may not have naturally been the females'.
Sometimes. Again, there are exceptions.
I've already made my point that nature versus nurture is not either / or in this case. The culture is grown out of the predisposition of the female consumers, yes, but in turn the images it portrays develop beyond that and become self-perpetuating as they influence growing girls as well as their parents, peers and authority figures.
That advertisement was a bad example, given that it was banned because people felt she was still too skinny (and rightly so because that's well below an average healthy female form, even if it does qualify as healthy)! Unless that was your point?
Well, if a girl gets called "fat" and picked on by classmates, when she has a healthy body size, that would be an example of it. There are cases of children wanting toys atypical for their gender and being forbidden by their parents. A girl interested in stereotypically nerdy or male dominated pursuits may be bullied by her peers also. In the past females have been actively discouraged from pursuing an eduction in STEM by teachers as well as others.
We want to stop pressuring people to assume stereotypical characteristics of gender roles. Most of all, we don't want to artificially hinder individuals that may do well in a role that defies the traditional expectations of their gender.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:45PM
Women dress to get attention from men. Women in films and fashion were traditionally costumed to get attention from men. Other women look at other women to see how they're getting attention from men - there's an entire industry dedicated to it.
Of course and there always has been.
Doesn't seem to be true. [nationalpost.com]
I know women who work in STEM fields. 70s and 80s documentaries on youtube show women have been working in tech for a long time.
Not for an athlete or someone who trains at a gym. So we should encourage people not to conform to traditional gender roles except for someone non-conforming by being physically fitter than average?
That's bullying and would happen anyway.
We'd have an easier time naming something girls didn't bitch and bully each other over. [theatlantic.com] For one women in STEM that I know, working towards a career in a typically male field was an escape from that.
I too was advised not to pursue things I wasn't good at - art for example.
No problem with that but how does it play into having equal representation when all the data says men and women statistically enjoy and excel at different things and pursue those jobs and lifestyle choices? I cannot understand why any company would hire based on gender rather than candidate suitability.