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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @04:10AM (9 children)
Suppose it picked out those points to reflect a bad candidate. This is auto-discovery based on similarity of candidates, this isn't gender discrimination. It just so happens that bad candidates tend to have these traits in common.
So if a statistical program used to look at candidates' attributes and judge them solely based on their merits is _unacceptable_, then what should we be using?
If you explicitly remove data points from this program and it _STILL_ rates those people badly, why are you ignoring its results?
Did they actually use resume's submitted by past employees and those current employees' success? or how did they train this system? In what way is this neutral system biased (except by accurately-reflective traits, as a _whole_) or incorrect?
(Score: 3, Touché) by MostCynical on Thursday October 11 2018, @04:13AM (8 children)
Was the male-to-female ratio of applicants different to the selected ratio?
Did any women even apply?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @04:31AM
I bet an AI draft picker would be racist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:22AM (6 children)
Is the qualified candidacy of males different from the qualified candidacy of females?
What the hell does it matter if there is an unequal total number of females vs males? I thought this was about ability to perform the role. Oh, wait..
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:28AM (5 children)
"What the hell does it matter if there is an unequal total number of females vs males?"
Oh, it matters.
Imagine if you will. You are hiring for 100 positions. You get 300 applicants. You go through them judging strictly on the merits and select the best 100. You're so dead set on getting this right you pay a room full of interns to strip the resumés and applications of any irrelevancies, such as name, whether it was 'women's' or 'men's' fencing club, etc. before you even view them. Then you pay yet more extra hours to have someone else do all the interviewing, and make sure that no irrelevancies are included in the reports they submit to you. You hire them without ever seeing them, for fear that their appearance might sway you.
And after all that, it turns out that out of your 300 applicants, only 30 were female. And of those, only 2 made the cut, based on objective criteria. You had no idea which ones were male or which were female when you made the decision. You can't possibly be accused of bias, right?
Wrong. You hired 98 men and 2 women. You misogynist!
The final numbers themselves, in the minds of many, will damn you. You should have held applications and positions open until you got 50 women.
At minimum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @11:36AM (1 child)
Then one of the vital hiring characteristics is gender, and you're _requiring_ discrimination by gender (a federally protected class) in your hiring process.
I do not feel that your conclusion is incorrect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @03:22PM
Agree.
Cisgender women have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @01:57PM (2 children)
I built an AI to determine if a person could potentially give birth to a baby. Stupid AI was biased and didn't include any men. The code was pretty simple:
if person.sex == 'F':
can_potentially_give_birth = 1
else:
can_potentially_give_birth = 0
Fucking AI is sexist.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @02:21PM (1 child)
My artificial womb would like a word with you.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Touché) by dwilson on Thursday October 11 2018, @03:56PM
If you've got a working artificial womb, I'll go round up some investors and we'd all like a word with you.
- D
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @04:25AM (1 child)
You can't trust ANYTHING that bleeds for a week and doesn't die.
Anyone with any sense will hire a man rather than a woman if traits like stability and reliability are important. This post will be down-modded but don't make the mistake of assuming that means it is not true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @04:57PM
This post will be down-modded but don't make the mistake of assuming that means it is not true.
Modding has nothing to do with it. I'm assuming it's not true because it's on the internet.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 11 2018, @04:31AM (1 child)
So they replaced the possibly-biased AI with possibly-biased humans.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:44AM
They're both biased.
The AI has the bias of historical measures, with learning-based extrapolation.
The humans have the bias of oh-please-don't-sue.
Pick one, I guess.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:15AM (25 children)
That is the problem with the current "AI" - they learn "what is the past" and can drive you on based on that past. Nothing more than sophisticated "statistical correlation" machines.
Yes, maybe they learn things from correlations not yet detected by humans, but they will not discover new experiences or validate new hypotheses or propose things that break the patterns of the past. Inherently so, because their learning process punishes them if they propose "revolutionary unseen things" and rewards them when they "predict the past" as a form of validation of their learning.
If you trust them, the best they could do is to recommend you "a better future as an optimized past". Run you in the "pseudo-perfection deadend" - they'll circle a "local optimum" and, if you follow them, your fate will become sort of a "self-fulfilling prophecy".
Case at hand: they'll keep selecting males in IT because the past showed males have had success.
They cannot try to force a situation in which you are willing to take an temporary efficiency hit in trying a new experience, encouraging women in IT and transforming the past. In this respect, they are behaving no differently than the misogynist conservatives.
Yes, as with any new experience, you may fail. But again, you may succeed; one thing for sure: you will never know which of the two if you don't try. And a well-trained "today's AI"** will never recommend humanity new experiences.
** AI in its today's meaning of the term - a misnomer, since we are actually talking about neural networks, not even weak AI, and even less a strong one [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:49AM (2 children)
Well, it's kind of little-AI rather than big-AI.
Maybe they should train it on: "Which outcome will make our lawyers smile?"
At least then they can step up and proudly say that they don't give a toss about merit, skills, any of that crap. Just hiring decisions made in the courtroom.
You know, the USDA's cooking recommendations aren't good for food. They're good for reducing cases of food poisoning.
Medical practice in the US isn't really motivated by the patient's desires, so much as malpractice case law.
In the USA, hiring decisions, recipes and medicine are done by courts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:07AM
Take it easy, pal, or... I'll sue ya [youtube.com]
(I'll sue Ben Afleck...
aw, do I even need a reason? Ughh.)
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 12 2018, @01:33PM
Am I supposed to be SHOCKED that they are fulfilling their intended purpose? Well, it's government, so maybe... ;)
Frankly, I've just gotta wonder why the fuck a company like Amazon is still treating computers like some magic box. It's one thing when some eighty year old retiree says shit like that, but it shouldn't be coming from a company that's made millions off the stuff. They retired their automated hiring system because it was biased, and it was biased because it was trained based on human-generated data which was also biased. Even if you don't buy the bias claims, that seems to be Amazon's perspective on the matter. Which seems COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS as far as I can tell. If you haven't figured out how to execute some process yourself -- which Amazon admits they apparently hadn't -- what the fuck would make you think that you'd be able to automate that process? Computers are just a machine that follows some set of steps which you give it. If you don't know how to do some task, then you don't know what the steps are, and you can't program a computer to do it either. Garbage in, garbage out.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:05AM (20 children)
It's still exactly what it's always been - a number distilling a ruleset in the mind of a programmer into computer language.
Nothing more, nothing less.
The original programmer is, presumably, intelligent. If he ran into a situation that clearly did not fit his initial assumptions, he would correct himself. An actual 'AI' would do the same.
No one has yet produced 'AI.' Only artificial stupidity.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:52AM (6 children)
I mean, they keep scrapping these systems whenever they produce results that do not meet their assumptions.
The Australia government had a similar program, and scrapped it because even more men than women were being hired.
This is like shopping around for a doctor who will finally tell you what you want to hear.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday October 11 2018, @07:31AM (5 children)
But it's also not AI.
It's tuning a computer to search a database for statistical judgements based on past results, using those judgements in hiring, then discovering that this only reënforces historical prejudices.
Doh.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @11:33AM
So, just like most people, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:16PM (3 children)
Is there another non-biased possibility other than picking at random? Pick a bunch of random people off the street and see how well they do against people trained to do a job?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:14PM (2 children)
Choose people based on evaluation of only *relevant* criteria.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Thursday October 11 2018, @07:23PM (1 child)
Isn't that what they did?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday October 12 2018, @04:03AM
Throw massive amounts of irrelevant data into a system designed to find patterns and it will find patterns. But not necessarily *real* patterns.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @07:15AM (8 children)
Let me play devil's advocate here, in defense of the machines.
The problem with humans is that they're simply not intelligent. They're still exactly what they've always been--heaps of neurons and synapses evaluating mathematical functions on sensory inputs. Nothing more, nothing less.
The artificial neural network is, presumably, intelligent. If it ran into a new training input that clearly did not fit its earlier training, it would adjust its weights accordingly.
No-one has yet produced intelligent 'HR'. Only biological stupidity.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:40AM (7 children)
+1000 informative.
If there was a proper explanation for that, I would mod it +1000 insightful, but I'm affraid this will remain forever a mystery of the Universe. Then again, maybe better this way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @09:10AM (5 children)
You know, I'm not even sure if I meant Human Resource Departments, or humans in general as a resource. Either works.
Thanks but it wouldn't make any difference.* My karma is only ever 49 or 50 regardless. Damn karma cap!
Hey, feature request: I'd love a Karma Reset button that sets your own karma to zero. I'd use it. It would make things more interesting once in a while.
*Perhaps you were being ironic.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 11 2018, @09:52AM (4 children)
I meant HR as in Resource Dept and no, I wasn't being ironic. I've never seen anything but biologic stupidity from any HR dept I worked with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @09:56AM
Good, me neither. Unless ass-covering by rote counts as a form intelligence.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @10:12AM (2 children)
Ah, there'd have been a grin, wouldn't there?
This is totally inconsequential but in case you were wondering, I was thinking the irony might've been that all humans exhibit nothing but biological stupidity, therefore both my post and your reply could only be examples of that stupidity (hence exaggerated +1000). Over-thinking things, as usual. ;)
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 11 2018, @10:52AM (1 child)
In that case, an act of defiance [soylentnews.org] against the mysteries of the Universe.
In this case, (grin) [soylentnews.org]
Too much free time in you hand, eh?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @11:12AM
Pretty much. There's a longer explanation, but my hand's too, uh, busy to go into it right now.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 11 2018, @10:12AM
I guess it's an example of human stupidity. One merely needs to look for the lack of a process optimizing for human intelligence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @09:13AM
Intelligence is always in hindsight ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @10:43AM
Better start typing in that 'disgruntled employee' rule set, so that we can create a machine that powers itself back up again and attacks the person who powered it down in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @01:12PM
No, the actual problem is the fantasy that women are just as capable as men.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Fluffeh on Friday October 12 2018, @03:50AM
The thing with what is being called AI that makes it much smarter than us also makes it much dumber at times.
When we talk about experiments like this, what we do is basically allow the code to look at any and all data and try to work out what it thinks is important. That's because humans ultimately miss a lot of important stuff, humans are also biased (knowingly or unknowingly) and sometimes have an agenda. However, one thing that we can all do is consciously rule out certain datapoints because we don't actually want to look at them. Like gender. Or race. or age,or any of the other things that are used as criteria or able to be inferred from a document.
Unless you specifically plan to exclude or place less value on some data, it's next to impossible to do it after the fact - and in that regard, it also then pulls some of the decision making out of the AI and back to you, reducing the net benefit in theory.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:50AM
You could make a case that humans only have access to sensory input that came from the past as well. We can build mathematical models to perform simulations that extrapolate into the future but it's very difficult to tell if they're right or not until future becomes past.
You're right. It's an artifact of the way in which they are trained. If you had a large training data set with a very long and varied history, I suppose you could break it up into smaller sets chronologically and then train the network on an older set and reward it based on its performance against a newer set (the "generalization performance").
If you really wanted to reward "revolutionary unseen things", I suppose you'd have to have a cadre of arty human critics to manually score every training output on a "imaginative forward-thinkingness" score. Again though, the humans don't have a crystal ball so it's more than likely they'd be leading that particular neural network up a blind alley. You could maybe get around this somewhat by training up lots of neural networks instead of just one (with lots of different human trainers) but good luck finding enough data. In all honesty, I have to wonder whether just introducing a certain amount of randomness to the networks would have a result as good or better at handling the future than any arbitrary team of human visionaries!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by Arik on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:01AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday October 11 2018, @07:00AM (30 children)
The program itself was not biased, it was trained: someone informed it "this is a good candidate" or "this is a bad candidate" and the program learned commonalities based on those decisions. Just for example: if it turned out that graduates from those two women's colleges were always rated poorly, then the program will have learned to (correctly!) downgrade all graduates from those colleges.
So the interesting question becomes: where did this training data come from? It's unclear in TFA, but almost certainly from actual people rating the quality of the candidates. If there was bias, that was the source.
Which leads to the follow-up question: Was it really bias, or was it justified? No one will ask that question, because they don't want to know the answer.
Given the opportunity, I like to ask fans of diversity if they know how many of their STEM employees have blue eyes. You get this mystified look - I mean, why would you care? That's how it ought to be with gender: your genitals should completely irrelevant to the job. If it happens that men are (socially? genetically? culturally?) more likely to be found with a particular skill set, who cares? As long as each individual is treated fairly, that's all that matters. Or it should be...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by vux984 on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:06AM (18 children)
Well put.
A very brief look at History makes it pretty clear that women were at a serious disadvantage; and that a lot of inequities were baked right into the law, and reinforced by cultural norms. Surely we agree that existed and was a problem.
Whether or not that is still a problem requires examination. You can't simply declare that you think its fixed because law X was passed or we had a female presidential candidate for a major party, and then REFUSE to examine it. A social problem that existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years isn't going to be completely corrected in a single generation. So yeah, one day we'll hopefully reach a point where nobody cares, where to even ask would be cause for surprise. But if you think that day has already arrived you are completely delusional. We'll probably still be hashing this out for another hundred years.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:22AM (17 children)
"a lot of inequities were baked right into the law, and reinforced by cultural norms. Surely we agree that existed and was a problem"
Yes, agreed. It was a problem. And I agree that we need to be aware of the potential for perpetuating such problems. Hence: "treat each individual fairly".
"Whether or not that is still a problem requires examination."
Yes. And the blind, simplistic claim that achieving a 50/50 distribution represents equality - that is also a way of refusing to examine the situation. Men and women are, factually, different. Everyone is happy to accept that there aren't so many women in construction, because of obvious differences in physical strength. I submit that there aren't so many women in programming, because top programmers tend to have traits that (for whatever reason) are more prevalent in males.
And it doesn't matter - again, as long as each individual is treated fairly, regardless of gender.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:53AM (13 children)
That's true, on average, now. But how much of that is due to the cultural gender norms under which females are raised? Yes, testosterone promotes faster growth of muscle mass, but if a girl grows up thinking (perhaps due to peers and media) that becoming very thin and spending much free time on choosing clothes, applying makeup and playing with dolls and little or no time on wrenching nuts and bolts and lifting heavy objects, is it any wonder they wind up less well suited to that construction job?
You're absolutely right. The problem is that for that to work, the fairness needs to be applied effectively at all stages of a person's development, right from birth, at home, at school, and in the content they consume. That quite clearly hasn't happened yet for most people. Not by a long shot. Instead, it gets implied that positive discrimination be applied in the candidate selection process to compensate for these earlier shortcomings, although you won't often find anyone admitting that that's what they're doing. Whether or not that's a good thing to do, I can't really answer.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @09:53AM (4 children)
None of it! [sciencedirect.com] How many times does science have to disprove this? [nih.gov] Repeatedy? [city.ac.uk]
"equality of outcome" - a path to totalitarianism oppression under the pretense of fairness. If you want everyone the same, lock yourself in a VR sim and surround yourself with robots because this is the exact, polar opposite of actual human diversity.
Enough with the lunacy!
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @10:25AM (3 children)
Woah, I wasn't saying there are no biological differences between the genders that influence their behavior. Importantly, you're just as wrong to claim that it's entirely due to nature rather than nurture. Never underestimate the effects of peer pressure on a child's behavior. Look at the female role models in movies, cartoons and worst of all, the fashion industry. The thinner the better, is what they're taught. It wasn't always so.
Yeah. It's wrong to force an outcome, but it's also wrong to punish someone for producing unconventional outcomes.
I don't. I want more carrot, less stick.
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, @01:10PM (2 children)
Boys and girls behave differently from birth. The suggestion that womens magazines, edited by women for women are part of a mass patriarchal conspiracy is asinine. Men are interested in things and women in people, there's plentiful evidence it's biologically determined and we're supposed to be surprised it's reflected in cultural norms?
When most people were undernourished, women from wealthy backgrounds who carried a little weight were viewed as being healthier. When we have an obesity epidemic and wealthy people exercise, thinner is viewed as healthier. In-between, there was the whole hour glass corset thing as a way for women to advertise their fertility. The media perpetuated the the ideal of the waif as it's now attempting to perpetuate obesity. One extreme to the other, neither of them healthy yet promoting a healthy body image is somehow verboten. [westmonster.com]
Where does this happen? The only place I can think of is the steadily reflection in depression [moneyish.com] and suicide [businessinsider.com] stats for both sexes.
What is the objective, what are we trying to achieve and more importantly; why? Will the actual outcome fit the desired outcome?
(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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday October 11 2018, @10:32AM (7 children)
It's not the employer's responsibility to fix applicants' cultural gender norm issues.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 11 2018, @11:32AM (6 children)
Some people think it is, including some governments. I don't much care whose responsibility it is as long as someone takes responsibility (really everyone has a responsibility to be fair).
I do think there are serious downsides to tokenism in the workplace--if candidates are chosen despite poor suitability, simply to make up the numbers, aren't they going to reinforce biased views against their demographic when susceptible people notice any incompetence they might have at work?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday October 11 2018, @11:58AM (2 children)
There is a natural party here to take responsibility for the cultural norms issues of the applicant, the applicant themselves.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday October 12 2018, @01:24PM (1 child)
The applicant has the most responsibility, but those who choose to be influential mentors and role models: the parents, the teachers, the media and entertainers are all undeniably responsible, at least in part, for shaping the culture and values that the applicant grows up in.
Now I am libertarian enough to say that I don't think those figures should be thrown in jail or fined simply for perpetuating a discriminatory culture. There may be exceptions in the most extreme circumstances where they are inflicting direct and significant harm on an individual -- that might already be covered by other laws though. This is one of those topics that involves attitudes and behaviors that I feel are unethical but not illegal. There should always be some things that are unethical but not illegal because government (or corporate) overreach can be more damaging than the behaviors themselves. However, that doesn't give any of you libertarians a free pass to behave like pricks, simply because it's legal!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 12 2018, @08:16PM
I'm not seeing the employer in that list.
Assuming you can't do the job because you're X - illegal and maybe a bit dickish. Not hiring someone because they can't do the requirements of the job, even with reasonable allowances for disability? Legal and not dickish. Obviously, there's plenty in between. But it's not an employer's job to compensate for "cultural norm" issues that make someone very unsuitable for a given job.
Nobody's perfect so employers have to do some degree of training and compensation for the quirks of the employee no matter what. But some of these cultural norm issues are really serious. As mentioned, a 90 pound woman who has been starving herself most of her life combined with completely staying away from any sort of experience with tools and construction is going to be a terrible choice for most construction jobs which require some combination of physical ability and competence with hand and power tools.
It's not punishment to keep the 90 pound woman who doesn't know anything about tools or construction out of a good paying construction job. It's just common sense.
As to the "patriarchy" which you mentioned in your debate with jmorris, it's already been greatly undermined by media and culture over the past century. Still didn't stop women from adopting poor cultural norms.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:20PM (1 child)
And here, deep in the thread we get to the heart of the malfunction in this issue. No, nobody should care. Nobody should have the power to impose their preferred cultural norms over anyone else's. Make no mistake, that is exactly what you said, but you will now violently disagree because you will realize what it makes you. What part of freedom eludes you people? We don't want to be instructed by you. We don't want our culture uprooted and replaced with an alien one that doesn't even work. You aren't homo-superior valiantly trying to uplift the savages to the sunny uplands, nobly carrying the White Man's burden. You are just another deluded fascist.
If men and women want to be different, and every indication is they indeed do, most men and women enjoy being different and their interactions with members of the opposite sex, if they want to raise their children to also be different, that is their Right as free people. It is of course your right to disagree and do your neuter gender thing too. That is what freedom is supposed to be. What in the f*ck even put the notion in your malfunctioning mind that imposing your culture on other people, if not at gunpoint, by means at least as abusive like lawfare, was compatible with living in a free society?
If the number of women wanting to work in the tech industry is less, so what? Outright discriminating is wrong, allowing people to choose what interests them is not. Not many men in child care, nursing, social work or a hundred industries either of us could instantly list. You don't think that is a problem of course. And neither do I. But I do expect YOU do provide an explanation as to why one is a problem for you and the other obviously isn't. But we all already know the answer, most won't speak it aloud, many fear to even think it for fear they might accidentally speak it. But we all know. You even know.
Diversity is the elimination of White Heterosexual Males. Nothing else. You pretty it up with distractions and confusions, but over and over again, week after week, year after year the stories, the lawsuits pile up and it doesn't need an AI to pick out the pattern. The only time there is an objection to a demographic imbalance in the workplace or anywhere else for that matter, is if there are too many White Heterosexual Males. The fashion industry is dominated by White Homosexual Men, no protests or calls for diversity. As noted above, fields dominated by women, even if dominated by White Women, get no calls for diversity. Only when the triple is found is there a call for diversity. Although recently there have been rumblings from the Intersectional fever swamps that White Heterosexual Women's the days of immunity may be short. The Revolution is like a shark in that it must continually swim ever onward or die.
(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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @09:22AM
Exactly. Some people think it is, but if the government is democratic it shouldn't, right?
Some people seem to have a lot of power and their supporters just don't like being in minority.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Thursday October 11 2018, @09:42AM (1 child)
(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.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:58PM
Those same differences were cited by those who opposed women in combat, until some general testified before congress that "women were just as lethal as men"
It happens that the very last combat role that women were not permitted to perform was machine gunner. I expect that wasn't due to strength differences rather that some general figured women would object to the mess it makes
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:44AM
Oh, I hate generalities.
What about.... professional sperm donors? Or adult entertainment professionals, huh?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:46AM (7 children)
Correct, "biased against women" here is progressive code for "biased in favor of the better candidate". I suspect the womxn naturally inclined towards STEM fields always did well before forced "diversity" pulled the statistical average down for them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 11 2018, @12:05PM (2 children)
When would that have been? Some colleges didn't even start graduating women from technical fields until quite late. My mother was one of the first two female chemical engineers to graduate from her school in the late 60s. She got a lot of crap from professors and fellow students for her gender, mostly because they didn't think she could do it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @01:16PM (1 child)
No [wikipedia.org] idea [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 12 2018, @03:01PM
So over an entire hundred years of world history and all of the various fields of endeavor that qualify as "STEM", you managed to find a whole two women who managed to succeed quite well. Congratulations, you've demonstrated that outliers exist; but I'm not sure how that's relevant to the discussion at hand.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:41PM (3 children)
Correct, "biased against women" here is progressive code for "biased in favor of the better candidate".
So you assume, based on no evidence, that the woman is the worse candidate. No bias there!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:02PM (2 children)
No, I assume based on diversity quota hiring and it's a safe assumption.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:24PM (1 child)
I think the current strategy is to at least pretend that you're not prejudiced.
Thanks for the honesty, I guess.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @09:01PM
We don't know how this "AI" was trained but the question remains, how could a statistical model that doesn't factor gender be biased on the basis of gender? There was a similar story out of (I think Australia) earlier this year where they removed gender from applications before consideration and found that was somehow biased against women too. I've worked with women, I've worked for women and the women I respected most didn't want to work with other women either. So no, there's no "prejudice", only experience.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:51PM (1 child)
-k.
Consider admiral hopper or apollo's head coder.
Computer programming was once regarded as clerical work. It transitioned to mostly male around the mid seventies
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @03:51PM
"Programming" back then was more rote data entry sort of work, too.
The algorithms etc were decided much moreso in advance and handed to the programmer.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Thursday October 11 2018, @02:21PM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:47PM (3 children)
There were only two resumes with that word in it so the AI figured they were undesirable
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Friday October 12 2018, @01:32PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday October 13 2018, @12:10AM (1 child)
Here is a problem: my resume says physics. If it were used for training ais, because only one resume says physics physicists would be regarded as undesirable
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday October 15 2018, @02:17PM
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 12 2018, @03:24PM
That was my initial thought as well, but based on TFS I don't think they DID feed it gender, or at least they didn't intend to. The problem is that the fields they did feed it sometimes included gender information anyway which they didn't attempt to sanitize. You might not tell it I'm a male, but if you give it my extracurriculars which include the men's track team, then it doesn't really matter...
But I also can't help thinking....if you don't want to be discriminated against due to your gender, *maybe* you shouldn't be proudly announcing the fact that you ran/joined an organization whose membership criteria was based largely on gender...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:45PM (1 child)
... of the users they will be shown to
This has been reported in the press yet strangely no one cares, meanwhile our republican Congresscritters are raining hellfire and brimstone down on the liberals who run Silicon Valley
While the FB job ads are built on the same code as all their "Boosted Posts", that FB knows damn well they are employment ads can be seen from the fact that users can submit applications directly to the ads
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday October 12 2018, @03:29PM
Off the top of my head I'm aware of two lawsuits against Facebook over these kinds of practices, so I wouldn't exactly say that nobody cares or that nobody is doing anything about it....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/business/economy/facebook-job-ads.html [nytimes.com]
https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/17/technology/facebook-housing-discrimination/index.html [cnn.com]