4 ms·

Not saying that I agree with quotas as a solution to problems like discriminatory biases in hiring, but how is a quota system "discriminatory"? What race, sex o

Not saying that I agree with quotas as a solution to problems like discriminatory biases in hiring, but how is a quota system "discriminatory"? What race, sex or age group is discriminated against by a requirement that appropriate proportions of those demographics make up the companies employees? (Heck in most cases quotas are simply a low bar, they are not even proportional to the population demographics.) I can understand how it perhaps seems unfair if someone is not hired purely on perceived talent alone, but they are not being discriminated against. That's not the right word for that.

maxxxxx 10y ago
Sure people with the right skills are being discriminated against if they aren't in one of the favored groups. There is also no quota for white people or men. In my company these groups seem pretty underrepresented in some departments. Maybe they should do blind tests like government often does.
- kjfskadhjkfahs 10y ago
  White people are underrepresented at most large tech companies[1]. So is almost every other race. The exception is Asians. Asians are vastly overrepresented. I don't think this is a bad thing. It is meritocracy in action. But it violates the common notion that meritocracy and equality are the same thing. [1] http://www.unz.com/gnxp/silicon-valley-has-an-asian-people-problem/ http://www.unz.com/gnxp/silicon-valley-has-an-asian-people-p...
  - sidlls 10y ago
    You're saying that Asians are more meritorious of positions at large tech companies than people of other ethnicities. That's an extraordinary claim. By the way, if Asians comprise about 30% of the workforce in the Valley, I wouldn't say they're over-represented. They're probably under-represented, in fact.
cmdrfred 10y ago
"We can't hire any more black people, we have too many as is, if your white friend was to apply we would hire him in a heartbeat we have trouble getting enough of those" Seems pretty discriminatory to me.
- usrusr 10y ago
  Or worse yet: "Sorry, a group of our employees recently went back to Mexico to start their own business there, we can only hire Hispanic for the foreseeable future." Bonus question: should the HR department be allowed to ask for ethnicity ahead of time or would noneligible applicants have to sacrifice precious time in futile interviews?
kakarot 10y ago
I think this is similar to the "equality" vs "equity" argument. Making sure a company is forced to hire a percentage of every single demographic is not fair even though it seems fair, and it also is discriminatory in the sense that instead of making it to where race / gender / etc don't factor into whether you get the job, it completely factors in.
dlss 10y ago
Google has actually released a paper on codifying what discrimination looks like for lending (https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02413 https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02413 + blog post: https://research.googleblog.com/2016/10/equality-of-opportunity-in-machine.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/10/equality-of-opportun...). It can be trivially extended to discuss hiring. Basically a fair hiring process as defined by the above would be: P(hire | features) = P(hire | race=1, features) = P(hire | race=2, features) This may sound a bit silly or unnecessary, but unless this formula is specifically enforced, if a race were correlated with expected profit of a hire, a hiring algorithm might accidentally infer race from the other features. You can see the paper for an extended discussion. With that background out of the way, let's consider hiring based on quotas. Since hiring takes place continuously across time, in order to maintain a quota across time we would need to change P(hire | race=1) based on the current composition of the company. Therefore P(hire | race=1) != P(hire | race=2) at least some of the time. Therefore it's discriminatory according to the above definition. Of course, you may not like the definition. I would be very interested to hear an alternate formalization of non-discrimination!
- justinjlynn 10y ago
  Ensuring model safety is indeed a massive pain and is completely non-trivial.
- tristanz 10y ago
  Unfortunately this isn't enough. Discriminatory rules such as "don't lend to any zip code that's over 75% black" will pass this test if you include this variable as a feature. The same logic applies to less obvious cases such as purchasing behavior.
  - torinmr 10y ago
    A particularly hairy case is where you use variables as features which are themselves generated through other potentially-discriminatory processes. For example, including a "has committed a felony" feature seems like a no-brainer for a hiring or lending application, but now any racial or other discrimination present in the criminal justice system has now "infected" your hiring process, so that the outcomes of your hiring process are now racially biased even though your process itself was not.
SmokyBourbon 10y ago
Example: The NBA institutes a rule requiring 50% of players to be non-Hispanic and white. This is well below 62%, the proportion of the population that is non-Hispanic and white. This rule discriminates against every black athlete who would have made the cut but didn't because a less-qualified white player was hired instead. Discrimination means to select one thing over another because of some criterion. It is precisely the correct word for this. Racial discrimination means selecting one person over another using race as the criterion. Racial discrimination is always immoral and is, thankfully, illegal.
belorn 10y ago
I can think of many situation outside of employee distributions where quota would be discriminatory and wrong, so maybe a better question is what make hiring process so unique? To give a few examples where quota would not work, lets talk about lotto winner. Why should winners not be on a quota so that winners are proportional to the population demographics? How is it fair that winner demographics don't match the population in race, gender and location? Or what about having quota on roads in order to create equal road maintenance based on population. You drive through a unpopulated area and suddenly only one car per hour can drive through. Or say that the police would use a quota system when deciding which crimes to investigate. Would it be fair to base how many murder investigations should be done by cities proportional population to the country? What about police budgets? It would be nice if we could talk about what other systems that we want quota on and see what commonality there is between those and what distinguish them from the others.
- pbh101 10y ago
  Your examples are interesting: Lottos: are known to give each ticket a fair chance based on a published set of rules. I think if that existed for hiring then many of the issues we see here would be gone. Unfortunately for many jobs it is difficult to give a test which is a fair sole determiner of suitability for work. And if I understand correctly also illegal in some jurisdictions, more or less because it can be abused. Roads: maintenance does in fact vary by the wealth of the supporting area. Try driving from Nebraska to Kansas on US77 for a stark example. In addition, roads are networks and thus it makes sense to subsidize maintenance of connections to increase overall network value. Police: some people do indeed advocate a form of this because they say police already relatively over-investigate crimes of minorities. That is, a white person has a higher chance to get away with any one given crime (for some categories)
  - dcow 10y ago
    While each ticket has a fair chance there isn't a 1:1 relationship between tickets and people. I think what's being asked is whether we should correct the outcomes of lotteries in response to opportunity inequality: force a 1:1 relationship. While road funding may be distributed based on usage data after the fact or density projection before construction, should we throttle traffic flow so that roads wear evenly? But should a murderer go free? And what of the scenarios where a given minority group collectively _does_ commit more crimes? It may in fact be nurture not nature (although it doesn't really matter) that yields such an outcome yet we would ignore such behavior because it feels overbearing to subject the group to "more" scrutiny relative to other groups that requires less. I think the point is that it is confusing to entertain such diversity policy when applied outside of a socially hot topic such as the tech labor market. But also a challenge to find a scenario where equality of outcome is objectively desirable and draw parallels.
facepalm 10y ago
Every quota is also a limit. If you say "there must be at least 30% women", it is equivalent to saying "there must be at most 70% men". Rephrase every demand for quota as a limit, let's see how that would go down.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

maxxxxx 10y ago

Sure people with the right skills are being discriminated against if they aren't in one of the favored groups. There is also no quota for white people or men. In my company these groups seem pretty underrepresented in some departments. Maybe they should do blind tests like government often does.

kjfskadhjkfahs 10y ago
White people are underrepresented at most large tech companies[1]. So is almost every other race. The exception is Asians. Asians are vastly overrepresented. I don't think this is a bad thing. It is meritocracy in action. But it violates the common notion that meritocracy and equality are the same thing. [1] http://www.unz.com/gnxp/silicon-valley-has-an-asian-people-problem/ http://www.unz.com/gnxp/silicon-valley-has-an-asian-people-p...
- sidlls 10y ago
  You're saying that Asians are more meritorious of positions at large tech companies than people of other ethnicities. That's an extraordinary claim. By the way, if Asians comprise about 30% of the workforce in the Valley, I wouldn't say they're over-represented. They're probably under-represented, in fact.

cmdrfred 10y ago

"We can't hire any more black people, we have too many as is, if your white friend was to apply we would hire him in a heartbeat we have trouble getting enough of those" Seems pretty discriminatory to me.

usrusr 10y ago
Or worse yet: "Sorry, a group of our employees recently went back to Mexico to start their own business there, we can only hire Hispanic for the foreseeable future." Bonus question: should the HR department be allowed to ask for ethnicity ahead of time or would noneligible applicants have to sacrifice precious time in futile interviews?

kakarot 10y ago

I think this is similar to the "equality" vs "equity" argument. Making sure a company is forced to hire a percentage of every single demographic is not fair even though it seems fair, and it also is discriminatory in the sense that instead of making it to where race / gender / etc don't factor into whether you get the job, it completely factors in.

dlss 10y ago

Google has actually released a paper on codifying what discrimination looks like for lending (https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02413 https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02413 + blog post: https://research.googleblog.com/2016/10/equality-of-opportunity-in-machine.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/10/equality-of-opportun...). It can be trivially extended to discuss hiring. Basically a fair hiring process as defined by the above would be: P(hire | features) = P(hire | race=1, features) = P(hire | race=2, features) This may sound a bit silly or unnecessary, but unless this formula is specifically enforced, if a race were correlated with expected profit of a hire, a hiring algorithm might accidentally infer race from the other features. You can see the paper for an extended discussion. With that background out of the way, let's consider hiring based on quotas. Since hiring takes place continuously across time, in order to maintain a quota across time we would need to change P(hire | race=1) based on the current composition of the company. Therefore P(hire | race=1) != P(hire | race=2) at least some of the time. Therefore it's discriminatory according to the above definition. Of course, you may not like the definition. I would be very interested to hear an alternate formalization of non-discrimination!

justinjlynn 10y ago
Ensuring model safety is indeed a massive pain and is completely non-trivial.
tristanz 10y ago
Unfortunately this isn't enough. Discriminatory rules such as "don't lend to any zip code that's over 75% black" will pass this test if you include this variable as a feature. The same logic applies to less obvious cases such as purchasing behavior.
- torinmr 10y ago
  A particularly hairy case is where you use variables as features which are themselves generated through other potentially-discriminatory processes. For example, including a "has committed a felony" feature seems like a no-brainer for a hiring or lending application, but now any racial or other discrimination present in the criminal justice system has now "infected" your hiring process, so that the outcomes of your hiring process are now racially biased even though your process itself was not.

SmokyBourbon 10y ago

Example: The NBA institutes a rule requiring 50% of players to be non-Hispanic and white. This is well below 62%, the proportion of the population that is non-Hispanic and white. This rule discriminates against every black athlete who would have made the cut but didn't because a less-qualified white player was hired instead. Discrimination means to select one thing over another because of some criterion. It is precisely the correct word for this. Racial discrimination means selecting one person over another using race as the criterion. Racial discrimination is always immoral and is, thankfully, illegal.

belorn 10y ago

I can think of many situation outside of employee distributions where quota would be discriminatory and wrong, so maybe a better question is what make hiring process so unique? To give a few examples where quota would not work, lets talk about lotto winner. Why should winners not be on a quota so that winners are proportional to the population demographics? How is it fair that winner demographics don't match the population in race, gender and location? Or what about having quota on roads in order to create equal road maintenance based on population. You drive through a unpopulated area and suddenly only one car per hour can drive through. Or say that the police would use a quota system when deciding which crimes to investigate. Would it be fair to base how many murder investigations should be done by cities proportional population to the country? What about police budgets? It would be nice if we could talk about what other systems that we want quota on and see what commonality there is between those and what distinguish them from the others.

pbh101 10y ago
Your examples are interesting: Lottos: are known to give each ticket a fair chance based on a published set of rules. I think if that existed for hiring then many of the issues we see here would be gone. Unfortunately for many jobs it is difficult to give a test which is a fair sole determiner of suitability for work. And if I understand correctly also illegal in some jurisdictions, more or less because it can be abused. Roads: maintenance does in fact vary by the wealth of the supporting area. Try driving from Nebraska to Kansas on US77 for a stark example. In addition, roads are networks and thus it makes sense to subsidize maintenance of connections to increase overall network value. Police: some people do indeed advocate a form of this because they say police already relatively over-investigate crimes of minorities. That is, a white person has a higher chance to get away with any one given crime (for some categories)
- dcow 10y ago
  While each ticket has a fair chance there isn't a 1:1 relationship between tickets and people. I think what's being asked is whether we should correct the outcomes of lotteries in response to opportunity inequality: force a 1:1 relationship. While road funding may be distributed based on usage data after the fact or density projection before construction, should we throttle traffic flow so that roads wear evenly? But should a murderer go free? And what of the scenarios where a given minority group collectively _does_ commit more crimes? It may in fact be nurture not nature (although it doesn't really matter) that yields such an outcome yet we would ignore such behavior because it feels overbearing to subject the group to "more" scrutiny relative to other groups that requires less. I think the point is that it is confusing to entertain such diversity policy when applied outside of a socially hot topic such as the tech labor market. But also a challenge to find a scenario where equality of outcome is objectively desirable and draw parallels.

facepalm 10y ago

Every quota is also a limit. If you say "there must be at least 30% women", it is equivalent to saying "there must be at most 70% men". Rephrase every demand for quota as a limit, let's see how that would go down.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]