5 ms·

When the Australian public service experimented with blinding demographic data on resumes, fewer women and minorities were hired: http://www.abc.net.au/news/20

When the Australian public service experimented with blinding demographic data on resumes, fewer women and minorities were hired: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria... A blind recruiting process only increases diversity if there exists significant bias against diverse candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if Silicon Valley has a bias in favor of diverse candidates, like Australia's public service.

tepe1 9y ago
You wouldn't be surprised because that's exactly what you want to believe. It's so funny: the more things change. For decades we've been hearing arguments about why women can't go to college, shouldn't vote, can't serve in the military, can't become doctors, can't become lawyers, won't make good judges, can't be a CEO, don't have what ot takes to do science. Every one of these idiotic arguments have proven false. And yet nothing has changed. Here we are in 2017 with many holding out that software engineering -- a trivial pursuit that mostly involves sticking crap in databases written by real computer scientists -- is somehow special. Most women just don't have what it takes. What it really demonstrates is that stupid people will cling to the status quo. In 25 years when in fact the majority of developers are women (because in fact we often see women dominate collaborative knowledge-driven fields) these arguments will look just as silly as the arguments that no woman could ever perform surgery without fainting.
manicdee 9y ago
Note that men and women typically present themselves differently on CVs and in selection criteria, with men typically giving themselves credit for work done in teams while women typically talk about the teams they were part of. This would easily explain why blind resumes resulted in a larger proportion of men being selected. edit: to contrast with the orchestra scenario, a resume is not a skill test, while an audition for an orchestra is a skill test for exactly the type of skill that the candidate is being chosen for.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  Interesting hypothesis, but apparently not what happened: "The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door." http://abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 http://abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to...
  - aninhumer 9y ago
    It's an interesting result, but is it accurate to call this "blinding"? I feel like hiding demographics and actively deceiving people about demographics are different processes and should have different names?
    - depressedpanda 9y ago
      Calling it "blinding" might not be accurate but, if anything, using deception, the study showed that men were discriminated against, not women -- contrary to what the initial hypothesis suggested.
  - cbr 9y ago
    Given "men typically giving themselves credit for work done in teams while women typically talk about the teams they were part of", then if you see a female CV it's more likely to be understated than if you see a male one. Which predicts two things: * People aware of this will prefer otherwise identical CVs with female names (expectation is the underlying candidate is stronger, just more modest) * Blind hiring will get you more men (because hiring managers can't correct for the male/female difference in self promotion anymore)
    - mpweiher 9y ago
      See, that is what is known as "sexism".
mpweiher 9y ago
And I think that this is the bind that Google and others are finding themselves in: the assumption is prejudice so they make honest and effective efforts to combat prejudice and don't get the desired result in terms of outcomes. See the example of the GitHub-sponsored conference whose trial of blind reviewing resulted in zero women speakers. So Google is getting hammered from two sides, on the one hand they're getting sued because the outcomes are not what they're supposed to be, on the other hand they are already doing diversity programs that at least skirt or already dip into illegal practices. (In his interviews, James Damore has mentioned secretive diversity session that were not recorded, unlike everything else at Google, and that told of practices such as quotas that to him seemed extremely sketchy or downright illegal) Of course this goes back to Pinker's comment in his debate with Elizabeth Spelke that we must distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex from the empirical claim that males and females are (biologically) indistinguishable, because distinguishing them is actually essential to protecting the core of feminism. Because if you don't distinguish and it turns out that your empirical proposition is false, you must then either (a) discriminate or (b) distort/suppress the truth, or both. And that appears to be exactly what is happening. https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.htm... UPDATE: Google's Diversity Efforts Fall Flat -- https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-little-progress-2470784457.html https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-l...
humanrebar 9y ago
You have an excellent point, but your use of the phrase "diverse candidates" misses the concern that the most important diversity is in thought and culture, not just predetermined demographics. A "diverse candidate" in reality may not look like an official "diversity candidate".
- mnglkhn2 9y ago
  Another question is what makes you think that all whites think the same and therefore it will narrow the spectrum of ideas? This assumption is never discussed and always accepted as true. Why is that? Why are all the whites (or white males) identical in their thinking?
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    It's clearly not true. Hiring a Slavic man would, in abstract, be an increase in diversity in a lot of shops. They're likely Caucasian, though. One response is that it's important to officially value historically disadvantaged groups, but many Slavic groups are historically disadvantaged. So, in a weird way, diversity initiatives come from a very ethnocentric (American) perspective.

tepe1 9y ago

You wouldn't be surprised because that's exactly what you want to believe. It's so funny: the more things change. For decades we've been hearing arguments about why women can't go to college, shouldn't vote, can't serve in the military, can't become doctors, can't become lawyers, won't make good judges, can't be a CEO, don't have what ot takes to do science. Every one of these idiotic arguments have proven false. And yet nothing has changed. Here we are in 2017 with many holding out that software engineering -- a trivial pursuit that mostly involves sticking crap in databases written by real computer scientists -- is somehow special. Most women just don't have what it takes. What it really demonstrates is that stupid people will cling to the status quo. In 25 years when in fact the majority of developers are women (because in fact we often see women dominate collaborative knowledge-driven fields) these arguments will look just as silly as the arguments that no woman could ever perform surgery without fainting.

manicdee 9y ago

Note that men and women typically present themselves differently on CVs and in selection criteria, with men typically giving themselves credit for work done in teams while women typically talk about the teams they were part of. This would easily explain why blind resumes resulted in a larger proportion of men being selected. edit: to contrast with the orchestra scenario, a resume is not a skill test, while an audition for an orchestra is a skill test for exactly the type of skill that the candidate is being chosen for.

mpweiher 9y ago
Interesting hypothesis, but apparently not what happened: "The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door." http://abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 http://abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to...
- aninhumer 9y ago
  It's an interesting result, but is it accurate to call this "blinding"? I feel like hiding demographics and actively deceiving people about demographics are different processes and should have different names?
  - depressedpanda 9y ago
    Calling it "blinding" might not be accurate but, if anything, using deception, the study showed that men were discriminated against, not women -- contrary to what the initial hypothesis suggested.
- cbr 9y ago
  Given "men typically giving themselves credit for work done in teams while women typically talk about the teams they were part of", then if you see a female CV it's more likely to be understated than if you see a male one. Which predicts two things: * People aware of this will prefer otherwise identical CVs with female names (expectation is the underlying candidate is stronger, just more modest) * Blind hiring will get you more men (because hiring managers can't correct for the male/female difference in self promotion anymore)
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    See, that is what is known as "sexism".

mpweiher 9y ago

And I think that this is the bind that Google and others are finding themselves in: the assumption is prejudice so they make honest and effective efforts to combat prejudice and don't get the desired result in terms of outcomes. See the example of the GitHub-sponsored conference whose trial of blind reviewing resulted in zero women speakers. So Google is getting hammered from two sides, on the one hand they're getting sued because the outcomes are not what they're supposed to be, on the other hand they are already doing diversity programs that at least skirt or already dip into illegal practices. (In his interviews, James Damore has mentioned secretive diversity session that were not recorded, unlike everything else at Google, and that told of practices such as quotas that to him seemed extremely sketchy or downright illegal) Of course this goes back to Pinker's comment in his debate with Elizabeth Spelke that we must distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex from the empirical claim that males and females are (biologically) indistinguishable, because distinguishing them is actually essential to protecting the core of feminism. Because if you don't distinguish and it turns out that your empirical proposition is false, you must then either (a) discriminate or (b) distort/suppress the truth, or both. And that appears to be exactly what is happening. https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.htm... UPDATE: Google's Diversity Efforts Fall Flat -- https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-little-progress-2470784457.html https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-l...

humanrebar 9y ago

You have an excellent point, but your use of the phrase "diverse candidates" misses the concern that the most important diversity is in thought and culture, not just predetermined demographics. A "diverse candidate" in reality may not look like an official "diversity candidate".

mnglkhn2 9y ago
Another question is what makes you think that all whites think the same and therefore it will narrow the spectrum of ideas? This assumption is never discussed and always accepted as true. Why is that? Why are all the whites (or white males) identical in their thinking?
- humanrebar 9y ago
  It's clearly not true. Hiring a Slavic man would, in abstract, be an increase in diversity in a lot of shops. They're likely Caucasian, though. One response is that it's important to officially value historically disadvantaged groups, but many Slavic groups are historically disadvantaged. So, in a weird way, diversity initiatives come from a very ethnocentric (American) perspective.