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I hate this industry. Shooting themselves in the foot over and over again because no one can get passed the idea that possibly, women can be just as good at mat
by trustmath 8y ago
I hate this industry. Shooting themselves in the foot over and over again because no one can get passed the idea that possibly, women can be just as good at math, logic and computer science - if people would just let them. This never ends. It's just one place after another, when it gets discovered. It never changes.
- ry_ry 8y agoYour comment will probably end up buried, but it does raise the question - if they want more female employees, was the issue in the training data, or their recruitment process?
- trustmath 8y agoBuried, yes, I'm sure. This should be obvious when testing. Whether the algorithm discriminates should be a top priority for designing these algorithms. That's half the damn math of machine learning. If you can construct an AI, you should know how to test it for flaw in reasoning. It's just another layer of ML to do that. Outliers. It's short sighted to push these things out assuming their output is correct just because it looks 'normal'.
- exo762 8y agoWhy not "women are just not as interested in math, logic and computer science to pursue it AS OFTEN as men"? Why are you not considering this possibility?
- trustmath 8y agoThat's always the excuse but an algorithm that shows bias against women has nothing to do with who has what interest unless that's a variable included in the data set initially. You are inferring that relation implicitly due to the result of the algorithm, but it doesn't mean that value is measured in the original set of data. If the algorithm is skewed to imply that, there is at least the possiblity that the algorithm has been trained to yield that result. I wouldn't know unless I looked at all the data. But I'm not going to default to the popular opinion because that's literally half or more of the problem.
- village-idiot 8y agoThey did in the medium past, they didn’t in the recent past, and maybe they will again in the near future.
- komali2 8y agoAh, the Damore argument. Besides the fact that his psuedo science has been summarily handled[0], to consider his argument you then have to equally consider the possibility of sexism in academia pressuring women to not study these subjects and societal pressure their whole lives pressuring them to not persue these career paths. There's also the idea that lack of women scientist "heroes" can be limiting (lack of role models). Basically the idea that if you stack the cards against a population, you're gonna see population-wide effects. Given these data points, a biased hiring AI contributes to the problem. Therefore, it should be fixed, along with the above points. [0]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-40865261 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-40865261 [0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/james-damore-google-memo-youtube-white-men-radicalization https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/james-dam...
- 21 8y ago> There's also the idea that lack of women scientist "heroes" can be limiting (lack of role models) This one is a bit weird, computer guys were always "nerds" and "geeks" to stay away from.
- komali2 8y agoWouldn't being an outcast make you even more attracted to heroes of your "outcast class?" Because, presumably, the hero had to overcome so much more for society to recognize them. Depending on the era, we had Einstein, Turing, feinman. Kids my age had Gates (literally the richest man on the planet for my entire formative years), Jobs, Bill Nye. Little further along are the myth busters crew, musk... We have plenty of heroes to pick from :)
- SolaceQuantum 8y agoThe rhetorical context here is that human children look for other human adults that they could potentially grow into in order to aim their own dreams and hopes for their adulthood. If a young human boy sees an adult human man pursuing computers, the young human boy learns that being interested in computers is a socially viable construct and this will affect how he pursues his interests in the future. In consequence, if a young human girl does not see any adult human women in computers, she may not understand that that option is available to her and this will affect how she pursues her interests. Although there is some fuzziness in determining this (some children grow up to be trailblazers, others pursue passions regardless of examples).
- kaitai 8y agoIf these women are applying for tech jobs at Amazon, they're by definition interested. The uninterested (male or female) are not relevant to this discussion. I must say, I am frustrated by this being brought up in every discussion of women & STEM. Want to discuss the leaky pipeline from physics PhDs to full professor in physics? "Maybe those women did a PhD in physics despite not being interested, and they just didn't notice before!"
- thoughtexplorer 8y agoBecause that's an inconvenient truth that doesn't fit the oppressor vs oppressed narrative.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- trustmath 8y agoTruth over the belief of who is actually 'the best fit' for a job doesn't exist until the job is complete. This isn't about oppression. It's about discrimination magically becoming automated because no one bothers to look for these things pre-deployment.
- mcguire 8y agoLet's say you have two otherwise-identical resumes in front of you. * One says "executed concentration camp prisoners in Kosovo". (Yeah, ok, I'm kidding. How about "Executed a plan to reduce production costs by 30%"?) * The other says, "Won the Women's World Chess Championship 3 years in a row". The first has five stars (thanks to "executed") and the second has three (courtesy of "women's"). Which are you more interested in?
- tzs 8y agoI haven't seen anything suggesting women are less interested, but there is some support for the idea that before college girls who are interested in math., etc., are more likely than boys to have other subjects that interest them more. There was a study published a while back that looked at PISA data and found that girls and boys were pretty evenly represented among the kids who were at the top in STEM [1]. But it also found that for the boys in that group quite often STEM was the only thing they were outstanding at. In other areas they were average to good. For the girls, on the other hand, they were often excellent at something else in addition to STEM, with them often even being better at that something else than they were in STEM. People have a tendency to pursue a career in one of the areas they are very good at. This suggests that boys who are very good in math, etc., are more likely than similarly good girls to pursue it as a career because that is their only choice if they want to go into something they are very good at. The girls are more likely to have math, etc., as one of two or more possible careers in areas they are very good at. In pop culture terms, STEM boys are more like Martin Prince, and STEM girls are more like Lisa Simpson. [1] I didn't save the link and have failed to find it with Google. Anyone have it?
- UncleMeat 8y agoWe did consider this possibility. Then we did research and the experts and they found that this isn't supported by evidence.
- komali2 8y agoI understand your frustration, but in my experience recruiting, the primary reason behind there being less women getting hired into engineering roles is almost never raw sexism. Maybe in the 90s, but in the early 10s there was tons of policy around it, bosses were setting the culture, we were doing everything "right." But we were still not hiring that many women, simply because hardly any women ever applied. For chem e, Mech e, EE roles with 100 applicants, usually I'd see at most one female applicant. It was rare to getm but when we did we'd push for the interview and they'd get through with an average success rate (compared to make applicants). I'm hoping industries that hire young are seeing different numbers than I did, because that should signal a shift in older ones that hire senior discipline engineers after a decade or so. Edit: that said, companies should continue to do what they can to remediate this, but I am furious that the government has done almost nothing about the issue. The underrepresented remain exactly that.
- trustmath 8y agoYes, I am female, I am aware of the statistics. It's frustrating because my life literally gets impacted by automated reasoning such as this. It's not frustrating for anyone who says 'there just aren't enough of you'. That's something that is very easy to say by people who never have to experience that sort of discriminatory practice. The painful stuff is when it's obvious and provable, because it highlights all the times it can be questionable as to whether it occurs.
- arbitrage 8y ago> but in my experience recruiting, the primary reason behind there being less women getting hired into engineering roles is almost never raw sexism. In my experience in the industry, this is a laughable statement to make. It's a shame that unless one is a victim of unconscious, systemic bias, one is so much less likely to acknowledge it as a problem, that actually exists, and hurts people all the time.
- komali2 8y agoI don't understand what you're saying - is your argument that only victims of unconscious bias will recognize it as a problem? If that's your point, I guess my counter argument is myself, not a victim, very aware of the problem, and acknowledging it as a problem as my post. There's also the victims of conscious bias that would probably be able to acknowledge the problem... Am I misreading your post?
- Skrillex 8y agoIs this not Amazon trying to not discriminate against women?
- trustmath 8y agoSure. It just sounds like their code and it's results got too complicated to reason about.
- thoughtexplorer 8y ago> if people would just let them. People do let them. You can't force what people are interested in and you can't let in that which does not exist. In fact many places in tech give preference to women applicants, because they don't apply often and the companies want more women. They're just rare to see. :( There's no grand conspiracy. The truth is much less exciting: Women and men have different preferences, generally speaking. Women are more interested in people (i.e. healthcare). Men are more interested in things (i.e. engineering). Most nurses are women. That's not because women are activity trying to keep men out. It's because fewer men are interested or apply! We also don’t see women in the most dangerous jobs. No one seems to have a problem with that, just as no one has a problem with most healthcare jobs being dominated by women. As they shouldn't, because people should be allowed to pursue and apply to what they want to.
- trustmath 8y agoPlease read the article. This article is about automated reasoning that discards resumes that are strongly correlated to resumes of women.
- sakopov 8y agoI think you need to read the comment again. The author's reply was to your comment saying "if people would just let them", not what the ML algorithm does in the article.
- trustmath 8y agoThat's somewhat appropriate, but, I think having higher standards for identifying discriminatory practices is covered under the umbrella of 'if people would just let them'. Achieving that level of a standard is a balance. There shouldn't be excuses being made. All that can do is contribute to the perpetuation of the conditions that presently exist, because the core issue isn't being identified. Furthermore, if the core issue is the excuse itself, then again, this is covered under the umbrella of 'if people would just let them'. The secondary issue would then be that the core issue isn't being questioned.