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Amazon Scraps Secret AI Recruiting Tool That Showed Bias Against Women

posted by martyb on Thursday October 11 2018, @03:59AM   
from the unseen-bias-is-still-bias dept.

"upstart" writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• Re:Source of training? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:45PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:45PM (#747531)

  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'.

  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.

  Sometimes. Again, there are exceptions.

  Of course and there always has been.

  become self-perpetuating as they influence growing girls as well as their parents, peers and authority figures.

  Doesn't seem to be true. [nationalpost.com]

  the images it portrays develop beyond that and become self-perpetuating

  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.

  that's well below an average healthy female form,

  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?

  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.

  That's bullying and would happen anyway.

  A girl interested in stereotypically nerdy or male dominated pursuits may be bullied by her peers also.

  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.

  In the past females have been actively discouraged from pursuing an eduction in STEM by teachers as well as others.

  I too was advised not to pursue things I wasn't good at - art for example.

  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.

  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.

  Parent