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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: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @09:35PM
Yet that's what the established patriarchy does, in a multitude of ways.
Look, my position is that positive discrimination is a crappy way to try to fix the effects of negative discrimination.
Negative forms of gender discrimination are unfair because they make unfair generalizations that may not apply to an individual.
I'm not sure who you're arguing against, because nowhere did I say that men and women shouldn't be different. What I said was that it's wrong to negatively pressure someone into a role they are not comfortable with.
Neuter! That's a good one! Not what I was implying at all. But yes, I have a right to disagree, and discussion of these values is what I feel strongly is important. Discussion and awareness are the best ways for a culture to develop.
I've not mentioned laws or guns at all on this topic. I've simply been expressing what I feel is and is not fair.
I actually agree with these statements. It would however be unfair to discourage a young girl from developing a future interest in tech if she wants to.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?