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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @09:28AM
This is just to much utter bullshit - I hate the kind of mindset that thinks spewing this kind of nonsense is okay unless your aim is to be laughed at.
Women DON'T want to go to construction jobs. That's the fscking reality. Women DON'T want to risk accidental permanent injury or death. Women DON'T want to do hard labor. In fact, no one actually does, not even men. The only hostility in a construction job is hard labor.
You need to talk in clear terms if you want to have a mature discussion. First thing you need to say is that "pretty hostile" is not because of men. Then second thing you need to examine is what women aren't encouraged to go there at any stage when the whole world and "patriarchy" will spend billions all around the world trying to put them into STEM and inside boardrooms.