6 ms·

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the isle.

a12k 2y ago
So easy. Should we also remove college attended or extracurriculars to avoid flagging potential demographic details like attending an HBCU?
malfist 2y ago
For every difficult and complex problem, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution. Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  > Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers. But Recruiters can glean this information from names and other information on resumes. And yes, many do deliberately try to use this information to decide who to interview. Recruiters at one of me previous employers linked to US census data on the gender distribution of names in their onboarding docs. They also created spreadsheets of ethnically affiliated fraternities/sororities and ethnic names.
some_random 2y ago
The E in DEI stands for Equity, not Equality. The explicit, stated goal is not to remove discrimination it's to discriminate in order to reach Equity.
drawkward 2y ago
>There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Yes! Build a robust economy so that everyone can have dignified work that pays a living wage, rendering any kind of hiring preferences moot.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
This assumes that the hiring managers or whoever are honest people who are not racist or bigoted in any manner and only display incidental racism or subconscious bias. If I see a HBCU as an applicant's alma matter, it's almost certain that they are black.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  Correct, and that's why hiding the fact that the candidate attended an HBCU would avert that kind of bias.
  - AdamN 2y ago
    So no colleges and universities on resumes?
    - Manuel_D 2y ago
      You could share data on the college, like the median SAT score of admits or the admissions rate. And I'm not entirely sure that omitting colleges entirely would be such a bad idea. Colleges apply selective admission criteria all the time, for athletes and legacy admits. Skills based screening would probably work better.
    - roughly 2y ago
      Well, then you have to account for certain jobs and hobbies being coded, as well as word choices in the personal statement. Once you blank all that out, though, we should be good to go.
healsdata 2y ago
Everything is easy until you account for the real world. A disabled person who has to request accommodations for the application process will immediately be outed for having a disability. The same applies for people who speak different languages. Beyond that, the application is only one place in which discrimination occurs. - It also happens during interviews which are much harder to anonymize. - It also happens in testing and requirements that, while not directly correlated to job performance, do serve to select specific candidates. - It also happens on the job, which can lead to a field of work not seeming like a safe option for some people. - It also happens in education, which can prevent capable people from becoming qualified. Lowering the bar is not the right answer (unless it is artificially high) but neither is pretending that an anonymous resume will fix everything.
- galacticaactual 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - clcaev 2y ago
    > A disabled person should probably not be manning ATC. This depends upon the disability and what reasonable accommodations could be made.
  - toast0 2y ago
    Many (or most) vision, hearing and speech impairments would likely be disqualifying for ATC; if they were to the point of needing accomidation during an interview. Mobility impairments would likely be able to be reasonably accomidated though; someone without use of their legs could work in an ATC facility that can be accessed without stairs, which would exclude some towers but not all of them. The workstation height may need to be adjustable as well, but that's not an unreasonable accomidation either.
  - healsdata 2y ago
    Let's see. The OP didn't specify they were talking about the ATC, I gave two examples of ways you could de-anonimyze resumes in the normal application process; I'm sure there's others. And glad to hear you don't think people with cancer or those who use wheelchairs should be allowed to work at the ATC, I guess.
xhkkffbf 2y ago
IT's not so simple. Eventually there will be an interview and the person scoring the interview may have some bias. And as someone else points out, some schools like HBCU have names that carry racial coding.
VoodooJuJu 2y ago
[dead]
theossuary 2y ago
This is literally one of the things DEI programs push to implement. I have a friend who helps make hiring decisions and this is one of the changes their DEI push included, as well as pulling from a larger pool. It just shows how much propaganda there is around DEI, you're saying we should get rid of DEI and replace it with the things DEI was trying to do. It really has become the new critical race theory.
- int_19h 2y ago
  It really depends on what the outcome is. There has been pro-DEI pushback on blind interviews and auditions when it resulted in fewer minorities being represented. One particularly famous case is when GitHub shut down their conference on diversity grounds after the blind paper review process resulted in a speaker slate that was all male. For another example, here's a pitch against blind auditions for orchestras to "make them more diverse": https://archive.is/iH2uh https://archive.is/iH2uh
  - Xelynega 2y ago
    In both those examples, why are you not giving the benefit of the doubt to the failed attempts? If GitHub attempted to anonymize applications and resulted in a biased selection, can that not be a result of them failing to eliminate the bias they set out to? Same with the blind auditions for orchestras, if they found that they weren't actually eliminating bias with the stated methods, why is it bad that they're not doing it anymore?
    - __turbobrew__ 2y ago
      The question is whether or not the results are biased. Maybe the best musicians tend to be male? It is hard to argue bias in a blind musical audition.
      - Xelynega 2y ago
        And it's hard to argue that your method you "thought" would eliminate bias actually does eliminate the bias you set out to eliminate. The only way to do that is compare results with expectations, no?
ndiddy 2y ago
The FAA were already not allowed to ask employees about their demographics. The article you're commenting on states that the actual problem was that the FAA added a new biographical questionnaire to the ATC hiring process, which had strangely weighted questions and a >90% fail rate. Applicants who failed the questionnaire were rejected with no chance to appeal. Employees at the FAA then leaked the correct answers to the questionnaire to student members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees to work around the fact that they couldn't directly ask applicants for their race. Here's a replica of the questionnaire if you're interested: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
BenFranklin100 2y ago
Agreed. However Progressives argue (wrongly in my opinion) that taking into account a person’s race and gender identity is the only wait to guard against discrimination. They explicitly regard ‘merit’ based hiring as racist and discriminatory.
- Xelynega 2y ago
  Who is this "progressive" that for some reason is only allowed to speak in the most general of statements and not make claims backed up with evidence? A lot of people seem to be arguing against caricatures of arguments either they or people theg trust have instilled in them, and not actual points being made by actual people...
  - BenFranklin100 2y ago
    I read your post three times and I still can’t parse it. If you’re asking which Progressives are making the arguments I described, go see Ibram Kendi among others. I am not caricaturing their position. This is what they believe.
paulddraper 2y ago
Blind hiring in practice that reduces diversity. [1] Draw from that what conclusions you may. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
jwlake 2y ago
The real key is to stop reporting those characteristics of the workforce.
sfteus 2y ago
My company's DEI program effectively does this. The main tenets are: - Cast a wide recruiting net to attract a diverse candidate pool - Don't collect demographic data on applications - Separate the recruiting / interview process from the hiring committee - The hiring committee only sees qualifications and interview results; all identifying info is stripped - Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result - If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting The separation allows candidates to request special accommodations from the interview team if needed, without that being a factor to the committee making the final decision. Overall, our workforce is much more skilled and diverse than anywhere else I've worked.
- naijaboiler 2y ago
  notice how these solution requires a dedication to diversity throughout the process from candidate sourcing to interviewing and all the way through, and not some simple cut and paste answers. The road to a more inclusive solution is dedicated effort, with continuous re-assessment at every step. There is no magical answer.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  > Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result > If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 20% of pediatricians are men? If you saw a hospital that had 50% male pediatricians, that means they're hiring male pediatricians at 4x the rate of women. That's pretty strong evidence that female candidates aren't being given equal employment opportunity. A past company of mine had practices similar to yours. The way it achieved gender diversity representative of the general population in engineering roles (which were only ~20% women in the field) was by advancing women to interviews at rates much higher than men. The hiring committee didn't see candidates' demographics so this went unknown for quite some time. But the recruiters choosing which candidates to advance to interviewing did, and they used tools like census data on the gender distribution of names to ensure the desired distribution of candidates were interviewed. When the recruiters onboarding docs detailing all those demographic tools were leaked it caused a big kerfuffle, and demands for more transparency in the hiring pipeline. I'd be very interested in what the demographic distribution of your applicants are, and how they compare against the candidates advanced to interviews.
michaelt 2y ago
> Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Doing so doesn't hurt. In my college, exams and coursework were graded this way. Unfortunately with resumes it isn't so easy. If I tell you I attended Brigham Young University, my hobby is singing in a male voice choir, and I contributed IDE CD-RW drive support to the Linux kernel - you can probably take a guess at my demographics.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  They could replace the university name with things like the university's median SAT admissions score, and admissions rate. Previous work experience is relevant to the job, so it'd be hard to argue removing that information, and working on older technology does imply a minimum age. Though I guess theoretically one could be a retro computing enthusiaist.
dataflow 2y ago
> There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. For job applications? (How) do you also hide their appearance in the interview?

a12k 2y ago

So easy. Should we also remove college attended or extracurriculars to avoid flagging potential demographic details like attending an HBCU?

malfist 2y ago

For every difficult and complex problem, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution. Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.

Manuel_D 2y ago
> Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers. But Recruiters can glean this information from names and other information on resumes. And yes, many do deliberately try to use this information to decide who to interview. Recruiters at one of me previous employers linked to US census data on the gender distribution of names in their onboarding docs. They also created spreadsheets of ethnically affiliated fraternities/sororities and ethnic names.

some_random 2y ago

The E in DEI stands for Equity, not Equality. The explicit, stated goal is not to remove discrimination it's to discriminate in order to reach Equity.

drawkward 2y ago

>There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Yes! Build a robust economy so that everyone can have dignified work that pays a living wage, rendering any kind of hiring preferences moot.

IncreasePosts 2y ago

This assumes that the hiring managers or whoever are honest people who are not racist or bigoted in any manner and only display incidental racism or subconscious bias. If I see a HBCU as an applicant's alma matter, it's almost certain that they are black.

Manuel_D 2y ago
Correct, and that's why hiding the fact that the candidate attended an HBCU would avert that kind of bias.
- AdamN 2y ago
  So no colleges and universities on resumes?
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    You could share data on the college, like the median SAT score of admits or the admissions rate. And I'm not entirely sure that omitting colleges entirely would be such a bad idea. Colleges apply selective admission criteria all the time, for athletes and legacy admits. Skills based screening would probably work better.
  - roughly 2y ago
    Well, then you have to account for certain jobs and hobbies being coded, as well as word choices in the personal statement. Once you blank all that out, though, we should be good to go.

healsdata 2y ago

Everything is easy until you account for the real world. A disabled person who has to request accommodations for the application process will immediately be outed for having a disability. The same applies for people who speak different languages. Beyond that, the application is only one place in which discrimination occurs. - It also happens during interviews which are much harder to anonymize. - It also happens in testing and requirements that, while not directly correlated to job performance, do serve to select specific candidates. - It also happens on the job, which can lead to a field of work not seeming like a safe option for some people. - It also happens in education, which can prevent capable people from becoming qualified. Lowering the bar is not the right answer (unless it is artificially high) but neither is pretending that an anonymous resume will fix everything.

galacticaactual 2y ago
[flagged]
- clcaev 2y ago
  > A disabled person should probably not be manning ATC. This depends upon the disability and what reasonable accommodations could be made.
- toast0 2y ago
  Many (or most) vision, hearing and speech impairments would likely be disqualifying for ATC; if they were to the point of needing accomidation during an interview. Mobility impairments would likely be able to be reasonably accomidated though; someone without use of their legs could work in an ATC facility that can be accessed without stairs, which would exclude some towers but not all of them. The workstation height may need to be adjustable as well, but that's not an unreasonable accomidation either.
- healsdata 2y ago
  Let's see. The OP didn't specify they were talking about the ATC, I gave two examples of ways you could de-anonimyze resumes in the normal application process; I'm sure there's others. And glad to hear you don't think people with cancer or those who use wheelchairs should be allowed to work at the ATC, I guess.

xhkkffbf 2y ago

IT's not so simple. Eventually there will be an interview and the person scoring the interview may have some bias. And as someone else points out, some schools like HBCU have names that carry racial coding.

VoodooJuJu 2y ago

[dead]

theossuary 2y ago

This is literally one of the things DEI programs push to implement. I have a friend who helps make hiring decisions and this is one of the changes their DEI push included, as well as pulling from a larger pool. It just shows how much propaganda there is around DEI, you're saying we should get rid of DEI and replace it with the things DEI was trying to do. It really has become the new critical race theory.

int_19h 2y ago
It really depends on what the outcome is. There has been pro-DEI pushback on blind interviews and auditions when it resulted in fewer minorities being represented. One particularly famous case is when GitHub shut down their conference on diversity grounds after the blind paper review process resulted in a speaker slate that was all male. For another example, here's a pitch against blind auditions for orchestras to "make them more diverse": https://archive.is/iH2uh https://archive.is/iH2uh
- Xelynega 2y ago
  In both those examples, why are you not giving the benefit of the doubt to the failed attempts? If GitHub attempted to anonymize applications and resulted in a biased selection, can that not be a result of them failing to eliminate the bias they set out to? Same with the blind auditions for orchestras, if they found that they weren't actually eliminating bias with the stated methods, why is it bad that they're not doing it anymore?
  - __turbobrew__ 2y ago
    The question is whether or not the results are biased. Maybe the best musicians tend to be male? It is hard to argue bias in a blind musical audition.
    - Xelynega 2y ago
      And it's hard to argue that your method you "thought" would eliminate bias actually does eliminate the bias you set out to eliminate. The only way to do that is compare results with expectations, no?

ndiddy 2y ago

The FAA were already not allowed to ask employees about their demographics. The article you're commenting on states that the actual problem was that the FAA added a new biographical questionnaire to the ATC hiring process, which had strangely weighted questions and a >90% fail rate. Applicants who failed the questionnaire were rejected with no chance to appeal. Employees at the FAA then leaked the correct answers to the questionnaire to student members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees to work around the fact that they couldn't directly ask applicants for their race. Here's a replica of the questionnaire if you're interested: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

BenFranklin100 2y ago

Agreed. However Progressives argue (wrongly in my opinion) that taking into account a person’s race and gender identity is the only wait to guard against discrimination. They explicitly regard ‘merit’ based hiring as racist and discriminatory.

Xelynega 2y ago
Who is this "progressive" that for some reason is only allowed to speak in the most general of statements and not make claims backed up with evidence? A lot of people seem to be arguing against caricatures of arguments either they or people theg trust have instilled in them, and not actual points being made by actual people...
- BenFranklin100 2y ago
  I read your post three times and I still can’t parse it. If you’re asking which Progressives are making the arguments I described, go see Ibram Kendi among others. I am not caricaturing their position. This is what they believe.

paulddraper 2y ago

Blind hiring in practice that reduces diversity. [1] Draw from that what conclusions you may. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...

jwlake 2y ago

The real key is to stop reporting those characteristics of the workforce.

sfteus 2y ago

My company's DEI program effectively does this. The main tenets are: - Cast a wide recruiting net to attract a diverse candidate pool - Don't collect demographic data on applications - Separate the recruiting / interview process from the hiring committee - The hiring committee only sees qualifications and interview results; all identifying info is stripped - Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result - If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting The separation allows candidates to request special accommodations from the interview team if needed, without that being a factor to the committee making the final decision. Overall, our workforce is much more skilled and diverse than anywhere else I've worked.

naijaboiler 2y ago
notice how these solution requires a dedication to diversity throughout the process from candidate sourcing to interviewing and all the way through, and not some simple cut and paste answers. The road to a more inclusive solution is dedicated effort, with continuous re-assessment at every step. There is no magical answer.
Manuel_D 2y ago
> Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result > If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 20% of pediatricians are men? If you saw a hospital that had 50% male pediatricians, that means they're hiring male pediatricians at 4x the rate of women. That's pretty strong evidence that female candidates aren't being given equal employment opportunity. A past company of mine had practices similar to yours. The way it achieved gender diversity representative of the general population in engineering roles (which were only ~20% women in the field) was by advancing women to interviews at rates much higher than men. The hiring committee didn't see candidates' demographics so this went unknown for quite some time. But the recruiters choosing which candidates to advance to interviewing did, and they used tools like census data on the gender distribution of names to ensure the desired distribution of candidates were interviewed. When the recruiters onboarding docs detailing all those demographic tools were leaked it caused a big kerfuffle, and demands for more transparency in the hiring pipeline. I'd be very interested in what the demographic distribution of your applicants are, and how they compare against the candidates advanced to interviews.

michaelt 2y ago

> Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Doing so doesn't hurt. In my college, exams and coursework were graded this way. Unfortunately with resumes it isn't so easy. If I tell you I attended Brigham Young University, my hobby is singing in a male voice choir, and I contributed IDE CD-RW drive support to the Linux kernel - you can probably take a guess at my demographics.

Manuel_D 2y ago
They could replace the university name with things like the university's median SAT admissions score, and admissions rate. Previous work experience is relevant to the job, so it'd be hard to argue removing that information, and working on older technology does imply a minimum age. Though I guess theoretically one could be a retro computing enthusiaist.

dataflow 2y ago

> There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. For job applications? (How) do you also hide their appearance in the interview?