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Let's assume that bias does persist past selection through the duration of the program. Does that change the interpretation when you look at First Round Capital

by agarden 11y ago

Let's assume that bias does persist past selection through the duration of the program. Does that change the interpretation when you look at First Round Capital's data that shows its female founders outperforming the males by 63%? I don't think it does. The test may not be sufficient to prove that you have no bias, but it may be good enough to prove that you do. When it does indicate bias, it seems likely to be correct. To put it another way, if it is 1948 and the only three black people in Major League Baseball are all superstars, then the distribution of baseball skill among black players is extremely unbalanced or there is a lot of bias keeping the average and moderately-better-than-average black players out.

notahacker 11y ago
The interpretation is still somewhat unreliable as in many cases there's still another hypothesis, which is that $UNDERREPRESENTED_MINORITY actually overperforms due to favourable treatment after the selection process Of course favourable treatment can't make people into superstar startup founders or baseball players (and I'm sure any special treatment afforded to black baseball players in the 1940s was the complete opposite of favourable). But more generally it can make an organisation with fair selection processes look like it sets a higher bar for $MINORITY because it addresses low numbers by being very keen to promote and very reluctant to fire/deselect members of said minority, so these kind of studies still have to be considered with care. (Of course even if an organisation is proactively treating a minority group favourably after selection doesn't mean that conscious or unconscious biases don't exist in the selection process.)
gozo 11y ago
There's one thing I don't get though. Being biased often means valuing something that is common among those you favor, but rare among those you don't. So even if one group outperforms the other, why would that in a practical scenario prove that your next candidate should be of that group? It seems entirely possible that if your program is "narrow" enough you could exhaust the pool of more successful candidates from a minority group. Of course this would be a lot more plausible if you're biased.

by agarden 11y ago

notahacker 11y ago

The interpretation is still somewhat unreliable as in many cases there's still another hypothesis, which is that $UNDERREPRESENTED_MINORITY actually overperforms due to favourable treatment after the selection process Of course favourable treatment can't make people into superstar startup founders or baseball players (and I'm sure any special treatment afforded to black baseball players in the 1940s was the complete opposite of favourable). But more generally it can make an organisation with fair selection processes look like it sets a higher bar for $MINORITY because it addresses low numbers by being very keen to promote and very reluctant to fire/deselect members of said minority, so these kind of studies still have to be considered with care. (Of course even if an organisation is proactively treating a minority group favourably after selection doesn't mean that conscious or unconscious biases don't exist in the selection process.)

gozo 11y ago

There's one thing I don't get though. Being biased often means valuing something that is common among those you favor, but rare among those you don't. So even if one group outperforms the other, why would that in a practical scenario prove that your next candidate should be of that group? It seems entirely possible that if your program is "narrow" enough you could exhaust the pool of more successful candidates from a minority group. Of course this would be a lot more plausible if you're biased.