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This will be unpopular but I don't care. What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire wom

• briandear 8y ago
  That is very interesting. What are the stats for unemployed female engineers? Is there a shortage of female representation because female engineers aren’t being hired or is there a shortage because there are actually fewer female engineers? There is a shortage of male therapists and kindergarten teachers: is that because males aren’t being hired or because there are fewer of them in existence?
  • mrnobody_67 8y ago
    Also airline pilots, nurses, michelin-starred chefs...
  • petsormeat 8y ago
    A lot of us drop out mid-career. I'd argue there's more a shortage of female engineering directors, VPs, CTOs.
  • deleted 8y ago
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• commandlinefan 8y ago
  Yeah - I'm not even expressing an unpopular opinion, just asking a (leading) question: where are all these women who are chomping at the bit to get into _technical_ positions like programming but find themselves being turned away by biased recruiters? I've never even seen somebody _claim_ that they were a woman who couldn't find a tech job, just people wondering where all the women were.
  • bicubic 8y ago
    Last place I worked at had to invest in additional resources to hire several females because the office was mostly male and applicants were overwhelmingly male. We did eventually find a few great female applicants, but it took a lot of work and a lot of time dedicated specifically to that goal. There does not exist some magical undiscovered pool of talented female engineers that are being turned away by biased recruiters. It's hard enough to find any sort of talented engineers regardless of other factors. Shit, it's not uncommon to recruit from other countries and cover relocation costs these days.
    • dudul 8y ago
      Can you share a little more what you did specifically to find female candidates?
      • deleted 8y ago
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      • TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
        Not the person you responded to, but a few hiring managers at my office found once they changed up the language in the job listing it made a huge improvement in female applications. If your staff is predominately male then you're wording will skew a particular way that may not seem inviting. Glassdor has a write up on how to go about removing gender bias with links out to studies: https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/10-ways-remove-gender-bias-job-listings/ https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/10-ways-remove-gend...
    • N0RMAN 8y ago
      Just being female is a qualification at your workplace?
      • hnbroseph 8y ago
        a rather curious question... what prompted it?
• happytoexplain 8y ago
  I agree with you, but I have to point out, because it's so common: The "this will be unpopular, but I don't care" preface is, I feel, about as damaging to the perception of whatever you're about to say as "I'm not racist, but". To make an effective point, I think you should avoid, as the first thing you say, painting yourself as an underdog brave enough to speak out by preemptively criticising your audience's reactions that haven't even happened yet. That's not to say you should never admit those observations - rather, I would reserve such broad criticism of people's opinions for a separate train of thought or conversation.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • crooked-v 8y ago
    Also, the "this will be unpopular" seems like it inevitably turns out to be virtue signaling for the "un-PC" people who will then aggressively make the thing popular anyway.
• guitarbill 8y ago
  > What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire women? One issue that keeps happening is an over-emphasis on CS-related questions. There are many great engineers I've worked with who didn't do a CS degree, and even though they are brilliant thinkers and talented engineers, too many times the interview question is "solve this problem using <pet CS 101 lesson, like red-black trees>". And the number of people who are hired who can barely communicate effectively is still shocking. Very few interview questions focus on communication outside the technical realm. So you can argue there is a bias in recruiting, simply because different people have different criteria for what the best traits/skills to look for is - even though everybody has the same goal, hiring the "best". I'd also caution about taking Reuters too seriously though. Seems that they've only focused on the gender issue, but this is the money quote: > With the technology returning results almost at random, Amazon shut down the project, they said.
  • dudul 8y ago
    I don't understand how your example is an evidence that data came from mean who didn't want to hire women. These interview processes exist sure, and I personally find them idiotic, but is there evidence that they disqualify women more than men?
    • guitarbill 8y ago
      From this article/Amazon - no. From my personal experience, yes. After we moved to a logic-based test, we were able to hire several more women from interesting disciplines including psychology, math, and biology. The tests involved technical problems written in a general way. For example, thread scheduling was written to instead involving painters, rooms, and drying time. We were able to hire 4 women on a ~50 person team in a very short time, and it worked out pretty well.
  • bicubic 8y ago
    > One issue that keeps happening is an over-emphasis on CS-related questions No. If you go down that path, then you are implying that women do in fact perform worse at CS-related questions. That's a much bigger can of worms than the bias being implicated here.
• petsormeat 8y ago
  Oh, there are a bunch of us, even here in the SF Bay Area. Trouble is, we're older than 35, or don't have degrees from "top" schools, and/or don't have the "passion" for bizarre extended hiring rituals. I could staff an entire dev team with non-male people within a week.
  • macinjosh 8y ago
    I don't have any sort of degree beyond high school and I have been a programmer/engineer for almost 15 years. Do I work at top tech companies? No. But that doesn't mean people like us can't be hired in the industry.
  • openbasic 8y ago
    > we're older than 35, or don't have degrees from "top" schools, and/or don't have the "passion" for bizarre extended hiring rituals This hits home so hard.
  • jhfhhhf 8y ago
    So what do you do now? Btw some men in tech are also over 35 and tired of hiring rituals.
    • petsormeat 8y ago
      After 15 years of front-end dev, I now work in retail. Some of my other peers are scraping by with Uber/Lyft. Some are muddling through as housewives or substitute teaching. And, yes, Bay Area tech hiring is needlessly hostile for men over a certain age as well.
      • hamandcheese 8y ago
        I’m a bit confused... surely going through a needlessly bizarre hiring ritual is worth it compared to driving for Uber or being a substitute teacher?
      • jhfhhhf 8y ago
        Ageism, OK - but still I find it hard to believe that you can't find a job if you can code. Maybe competition or demands are especially high in the Bay area?
• zby 8y ago
  "The non-male engineers I've worked with have always been exceedingly competent, smart, and their differing perspectives invaluable" - that is really an (anecdotal) evidence that there is a bias indeed. If the recruiting was all unbiased than the quality of existing male and female force would be the same - if female workers are of higher quality than it means that they need to pass higher requirements.
  • macinjosh 8y ago
    I didn't mean to imply the males I worked with weren't equally good. I was simply pointing out that, in my (anecdotal) experience, I couldn't see any reason non-males couldn't do the job well.
    • zby 8y ago
      So everyone you haver worked with have always been exceedingly competent and smart?
      • macinjosh 8y ago
        Obviously not. Every time I've worked with someone incompetent they tend to get fired rather quickly and I don't work with them anymore. As far as female vs. male goes I've worked with way more males than females and I just haven't happened to work with any females that have been fired for incompetence. Perhaps my level of judgement on other's performance is too lax but I tend to focus on my own performance and less on that of others. That's management's job, not mine.
        • zby 8y ago
          So there were a few incompetent males, no incompetent females - but you believe that it is just a statistical fluke. It might be - but it is still evidence for the bias, just very weak. I noted it because it seemed that you used it as an argument against bias - which it isn't.
          • 8y ago
• amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  Two comments: 1. The issue is certainly bigger than hiring. In the many years between birth and looking for a job, there are a lot of societal pressures that will impact what eventual careers people end up in. 2. Hiring managers are people. They are not perfect. They have biases. If someone expects an engineer to look, talk, and act a certain way, that can impact their decision making completely independent of the fact that they want to hire the best people for their company. Bonus third point: I still see a whole lot of "We want to make sure that the hire fits on the team." This is completely natural, and comes with its own set of built-in biases.
• Marazan 8y ago
  If there was an untapped market of engineers you'd better believe every tech company would be taking advantage of it. That's exactly the same argument used to justify every regressive policy. If x was true then rational y action would happen. But that's the poo tof racism and sexism rational y action doesn't happen due to the -ism.
  • macinjosh 8y ago
    Do you really think white men care so much about keeping down other groups of people that they would prioritize it over making more money and having more access to good workers? That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
    • beat 8y ago
      It doesn't need to be deliberate or conscious. It can be incidental. Or maybe women just aren't as smart as men.
      • sol_remmy 8y ago
        No body thinks that. You're way outside the overton window. Why is the health care field heavily biased in favor or female nurses and doctors? Are women smarter than men when it comes to biology/anatomy?
        • beat 8y ago
          You're right, nobody thinks men are smarter than women. And it isn't true. So, let's think about why we see gender roles in employment. Why are there so few women software engineers? One possible explanation is that women just aren't smart enough. If you don't believe that (and I don't), then you need another explanation. Maybe it's because of sexism. But if you don't want to believe it's sexism (as the OP implied), then what is it? They're not too dumb, and the hiring process isn't sexist, so why? And that's where hands come up empty. That leads to nonsense like the person on this thread who said women are "wired differently", which presumably makes them less suitable. Which is just a polite way of saying women are too dumb to program, without facing the reality that that's exactly it means.
• beat 8y ago
  An untapped market of engineers would be tapped... ...if and only if... ...there were no other factors at play that cause that market to remain untapped. For further rational thinking, consider this. If there's a bias, it doesn't mean women won't get hired. It just means they won't get hired for the best positions. Everyone else gets Amazon's cast-offs.
• kat 8y ago
  "Untapped market of engineers" yes it exists. The majority of my female friends with STEM degrees ended up as high school teachers. I had several older people suggest to me that teaching should be my preferred career choice because it was more flexible than a programming job (wtf...) "every tech company would be taking advantage of it" - nope, no one is. I don't know why but my guess is its hard to admit you're doing hiring wrong, hard to hire people who think differently than you, etc.
  • jhfhhhf 8y ago
    Maybe being a high school teacher is simply more pleasant than working in tech to some people? I don't think your example shows there is an untapped talent pool. Of course, in general, you can make a job more attractive (raise salaries, roll out red carpets, install slides...), and you will attract more people. That doesn't prove those people were an untapped talent pool. Presumably there is a price that would make a high school teacher consider working in tech again. That doesn't imply companies should be willing to pay that price.
    • beat 8y ago
      So why are the "some people" more often female than male? I keep seeing all these explanations that are just begging the question.
      • jhfhhhf 8y ago
        In my opinion, because women have less need for high salaries, and also because women might more often be socially able to become teachers, compared to men. Also, women and men are different and have different preferences on average. There is also the aspect that teaching is much less technically demanding. What makes you so sure it is discrimination? If it was discrimination, why don't these women just found all-women companies?
  • totony 8y ago
    To note, there are more women than men in high school teaching positions, so what you're seeing might not be that STEM has a bias against women but that teaching has a bias for women (or any other out of a very big set of possible conclusions) see: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EAG_PERS_SHARE_AGE https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EAG_PERS_SHARE...
• jahewson 8y ago
  Some reasons why I disagree with this polemic: 1. There's no reason to expect that these women will be unemployed - they just won't be working for Amazon. That's all we know. No point going looking for them. 2. You can't assign intent to hiring decisions made in the training data - there's no reason to believe that men (and why single them out?) "did not want to hire women". Maybe they did. Maybe they have no idea that they're biased - maybe the women making such hiring decisions are just as biased. We have no idea. 3. The evidence that the AI is biased, is that.... the AI is biased. Which means that the training data is biased. Why that is, is a great question - it may reflect unconscious bias in the hiring process, or more obvious old-fashioned biases. It may reflect that the model amplifies some minor bias in the training data and turns it into something much bigger. We don't know. So yeah, it's biased - the question is why.
• s73v3r_ 8y ago
  "What is the evidence that the source data for this 'AI' is biased because the men it came from did not want to hire women?" Nobody is saying that the biases was caused because it was created by men who didn't want to hire women. That's a fear-mongering straw man. What people are saying is that there was bias in the training data selected, and so the algorithm exacerbated that bias. Thus, being a cautionary tale about the training data you feed to these things. " If there was an untapped market of engineers you'd better believe every tech company would be taking advantage of it." You're assuming rationality where there really is no cause to do so.
• rrcaptain 8y ago
  Biases are rarely knowingly done, that's why they're biases. The proof is in the pudding though. The model Amazon came up with was biased against women. That suggests that female candidates in the dataset were discriminated against.