9 ms·

There is a simple way to fix it. Namely providing a means to submit your resume that anonymizes name, gender, age and anything that could bias the reviewer's as

There is a simple way to fix it. Namely providing a means to submit your resume that anonymizes name, gender, age and anything that could bias the reviewer's assessment. The best HR departments already do that, at least that's the hope.

potatolicious 13y ago
HR departments are legal shields - they will prevent bias against a protected class because that's a source of lawsuits. Unfortunately there are many ways in which a person may be unfairly discriminated when looking for a job, than there are protected classes in the law.
mathattack 13y ago
It's easy enough to fix for screening for gender, but it's much harder to fix the screening for age, because people like to see a sequence of activities. At the very least, work experience years comes across. When people leave off graduation dates, that throws up a red flag too. The harder part is how do you turn off the bias once the interviews start? This was an issue with many orchestras - they ultimately made the auditions physically blind. http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Goldin&Rouse.pdf http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Goldin&Rouse.pdf
- whiterabbit2 13y ago
  For tech companies it shouldn't be a problem to interview candidates blindly. Give some questions as written tests and coding assignments. If talking is necessary, there is software changing voice pitch. Skype has a plugin like that. Just interview a candidate sitting in another room, streaming what they write and use the same voice settings for all candidates. My impression that nobody uses written tests because companies want to keep bias, not to eliminate it.
  - jack-r-abbit 13y ago
    The problem with that is similar to "online dating". Sure you can learn a lot about a person without ever seeing or hearing them... but you don't really know a person until you have spent a portion of time actually interacting with them. If you are hiring a person to be part of a team, you need that person to gel with the team at least on some level. I don't think you could get an accurate representation of that if you can't hear that person's true voice, see their mannerisms, etc. I've been in situations where our team was down to two candidates that had various strengths/weaknesses but for the most part were equally qualified. Either one of them was just as likely as the other to be able to perform the work we needed someone to do. Is it wrong to go with the person that we felt would fit into the team the best?
    - mathattack 13y ago
      Exactly. You can anonymously sort for IQ, but not for EQ. And the IQ parts can be gamed. (I know of someone who "cheated" their way into Microsoft)
tehwalrus 13y ago
There was a proposal going around the Lib Dems in the UK at one point[1] to make it illegal to have names on CVs; because they describe gender, and sometimes race, too. The proposal went on to say that that people should apply for jobs using their National Insurance number (like a social security number, but basically just used as a UID with the tax office - I don't know what else a SSN does, but it seems to be more important than that.) This would mean that candidates selected for the first round of interviews would be chosen 'blind', even in small companies, which would limit this sort of subconscious discrimination. I'd love to see this sort of idea resurrected; the article is an excellent advert as to why. [1] before we got into a coalition with male Tories who think they got into oxbridge on merit...
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  It won't work everywhere; e.g. SSN equivalent in Poland has sex encoded as one of the digits (determined by whether it's even or odd).
  - WalterSear 13y ago
    If the bias is subconcious, moving to this would still have an effect.
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      People are remarkably good at picking up on subtle signals that correlate well with their existing biases. Instead of "It seems like a women" they'll subconsciously think "It seems like an even."
      - WalterSear 13y ago
        It wouldn't be perfect, but most of the effect would be removed.
  - larrys 13y ago
    "SSN equivalent in Poland has sex encoded" That gets supplied when sending a resume?
noloqy 13y ago
What's next? All the interviews have to take place in a dark room so that the interviewer can't see the color of the interviewee's skin?
- nollidge 13y ago
  No, that's not next.
- 6cxs2hd6 13y ago
  Turing Test interviews.
  - cpeterso 13y ago
    IRC interviews
    - Someone 13y ago
      Even that is not 100% watertight: http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php
      - whiterabbit2 13y ago
        I tried my own comments from this page. The majority gives me around 70-85% male (I'm a feminine female). But adding one comment which was talking "childcare" and such gave me "only" a weak male (saying it might indicate European). It's so stereotypical. Interesting also how it divides people into males, females and Europeans (the "weak" versions).
    - zxcdw 13y ago
      Where do I sign up?
    - rozap 13y ago
      Chinese room interviews.
- 13y ago
TeMPOraL 13y ago
> anything that could bias the reviewer's assessment Well, you could argue that list of skills, education and work experience could bias the assessment as well. There's no clear-cut line here that separates relevant from irrelevant. Sometimes even gender is relevant. For example clerks in grocery stores are mostly women and there are bunch of good business reasons for that (even if they are based on stupid social biases, those biases still are real and business value can be extracted from them). Also, once a shop commits to a particular gender choice, it might be inclined to stick to it exclusively. For instance, I heard a first-hand story from a local grocery store about why exactly it avoids hiring men (especially attractive ones) for clerks - because it leads to relationships forming between co-workers, which usually end with people left jealous and/or angry at each other. I can't really blame that shop for this choice, it is a rational one. I'm not responsible for hiring decisions right now, but if I were then one thing I wouldn't want to be anonymized are names. I do believe in the concept of maintaining blacklists against well known cheaters, spammers and other evil doers, and anonymizing names makes you unable to discriminate people by level-of-assholiness ;).
- epochwolf 13y ago
  > I can't really blame that shop for this choice, it is a rational one. Allow me. It's illegal for an employer to discriminate against applicants based on gender when it doesn't serve a direct business purpose. (Actors, Models, Priests, etc.) While I can sympathize and understand their reasons, I can not condone their solution.
  - gohrt 13y ago
    And this is why Abercrombie&Fitch has no cashiers, only "models". You can't legislate away reality...
- saraid216 13y ago
  This is one of the two-way street issues. There is real business value to be extracted from exploiting the existing sexism in society, agreed, but in doing so, it also reinforces that existing sexism. It's a vicious cycle of mutually supporting behavior. That is a problem. Denying said value is not necessarily the best solution, but some solution is necessary.
drpgq 13y ago
I moved to Germany to work from Canada after finishing grad school and was amazed to find applicants put pictures on resumes there. Ironically later we made an attractiveness estimator and I suggested we use it to screen somebody applying for a secretary position (I was only joking and actually more pointing out the ridiculousness of having photos on resumes).
- orff 13y ago
  ... and not only pictures. it is standard to include your birthday and nationality in your CV in Germany. And sometimes, the early career applicants adds the employers of their PARENTS in their CVs !!!
  - guard-of-terra 13y ago
    Maybe it's actually because people are less afraid of discrimination there? So they don't have to play it safe.
  - claudius 13y ago
    Sure, why not? Birthday might not be absolutely relevant, but allows to judge your success at school/uni/education much more easily, nationality is relevant to decide whether they would have to go through trouble to get you employed (if non-European), and the employers/jobs of your parents usually correlate strongly with your own qualifications, at least on a quantitative level. Whether you like the fact that a surprisingly large number of university student has academics for parents, it is still there, and if you want an intelligent person, it might act as a decent filter to look for intelligent parents, especially is said person does not have much experience otherwise yet.
  - drpgq 13y ago
    Wow never heard the parents' employers. It's worse than I thought.
jrarredondo 13y ago
At some point you do have the phone screen though.
lukevdp 13y ago
Wouldn't that just make the discrimination (conscious or unconscious) happen later? Sooner or later they will find out the gender of the applicant.
wizzard 13y ago
I believe Monster.com allows you to do this; there is an option to hide your contact info and only allow recruiters to contact you through the site. This is ostensibly to allow you to apply for new jobs without being discovered by your current job. I would imagine many job sites provide this feature.
lumens 13y ago
Unfortunately, the vast majority of HR departments (even the 'best') aren't doing this at all. My company, Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com https://www.mightyspring.com), is doing exactly this on a larger scale: we're a marketplace that connects people and employers, but the employers see anonymized versions of each candidate's data/career history. They request to interview candidates on the platform based on these anonymous profiles. Should the candidate accept, we reveal contact information to both parties and help schedule the interview. While we're still fairly early stage, we're aiming to expose bias at different points in the hiring process using this approach, and at the very least help employers understand their own biases. Acceptance is the first step to a solution, no?
- jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  It would be great to see this more. It could provide some interesting data. I would be interested to hear if anonymized resumes closed the gender gap for getting an interview or not. It could also expose a possible bias if the gender gap closed for getting a first interview but then the gap simply shifted up one level when it came to the second step of the process (ie, disproportionately more men move on to a second interview). Although, it might actually be harder to show a bias at that level since a lot of the interview process has to do with how well the person sells themselves, articulates their answers, presents themselves physically (ie, dressed appropriately), etc. These things also happen to be very subjective so it is kind of difficult to prove there was a bias. Which is also why it is equally difficult to prove there was not a bias. (Did you not get hired because of your gender? Or just because you didn't interview well?) I have no doubt that people get turned down based on unimportant "qualifications" like gender, race, age, etc. And that is wrong. But I also have no doubt that some people who felt they were turned down for one of those reason actually just wasn't qualified or blew the interview and don't think to look internally before they look around them.

potatolicious 13y ago

HR departments are legal shields - they will prevent bias against a protected class because that's a source of lawsuits. Unfortunately there are many ways in which a person may be unfairly discriminated when looking for a job, than there are protected classes in the law.

mathattack 13y ago

It's easy enough to fix for screening for gender, but it's much harder to fix the screening for age, because people like to see a sequence of activities. At the very least, work experience years comes across. When people leave off graduation dates, that throws up a red flag too. The harder part is how do you turn off the bias once the interviews start? This was an issue with many orchestras - they ultimately made the auditions physically blind. http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Goldin&Rouse.pdf http://www.uh.edu/~adkugler/Goldin&Rouse.pdf

whiterabbit2 13y ago
For tech companies it shouldn't be a problem to interview candidates blindly. Give some questions as written tests and coding assignments. If talking is necessary, there is software changing voice pitch. Skype has a plugin like that. Just interview a candidate sitting in another room, streaming what they write and use the same voice settings for all candidates. My impression that nobody uses written tests because companies want to keep bias, not to eliminate it.
- jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  The problem with that is similar to "online dating". Sure you can learn a lot about a person without ever seeing or hearing them... but you don't really know a person until you have spent a portion of time actually interacting with them. If you are hiring a person to be part of a team, you need that person to gel with the team at least on some level. I don't think you could get an accurate representation of that if you can't hear that person's true voice, see their mannerisms, etc. I've been in situations where our team was down to two candidates that had various strengths/weaknesses but for the most part were equally qualified. Either one of them was just as likely as the other to be able to perform the work we needed someone to do. Is it wrong to go with the person that we felt would fit into the team the best?
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Exactly. You can anonymously sort for IQ, but not for EQ. And the IQ parts can be gamed. (I know of someone who "cheated" their way into Microsoft)

tehwalrus 13y ago

There was a proposal going around the Lib Dems in the UK at one point[1] to make it illegal to have names on CVs; because they describe gender, and sometimes race, too. The proposal went on to say that that people should apply for jobs using their National Insurance number (like a social security number, but basically just used as a UID with the tax office - I don't know what else a SSN does, but it seems to be more important than that.) This would mean that candidates selected for the first round of interviews would be chosen 'blind', even in small companies, which would limit this sort of subconscious discrimination. I'd love to see this sort of idea resurrected; the article is an excellent advert as to why. [1] before we got into a coalition with male Tories who think they got into oxbridge on merit...

TeMPOraL 13y ago
It won't work everywhere; e.g. SSN equivalent in Poland has sex encoded as one of the digits (determined by whether it's even or odd).
- WalterSear 13y ago
  If the bias is subconcious, moving to this would still have an effect.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    People are remarkably good at picking up on subtle signals that correlate well with their existing biases. Instead of "It seems like a women" they'll subconsciously think "It seems like an even."
    - WalterSear 13y ago
      It wouldn't be perfect, but most of the effect would be removed.
- larrys 13y ago
  "SSN equivalent in Poland has sex encoded" That gets supplied when sending a resume?

noloqy 13y ago

What's next? All the interviews have to take place in a dark room so that the interviewer can't see the color of the interviewee's skin?

nollidge 13y ago
No, that's not next.
6cxs2hd6 13y ago
Turing Test interviews.
- cpeterso 13y ago
  IRC interviews
  - Someone 13y ago
    Even that is not 100% watertight: http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php
    - whiterabbit2 13y ago
      I tried my own comments from this page. The majority gives me around 70-85% male (I'm a feminine female). But adding one comment which was talking "childcare" and such gave me "only" a weak male (saying it might indicate European). It's so stereotypical. Interesting also how it divides people into males, females and Europeans (the "weak" versions).
  - zxcdw 13y ago
    Where do I sign up?
  - rozap 13y ago
    Chinese room interviews.
13y ago

TeMPOraL 13y ago

> anything that could bias the reviewer's assessment Well, you could argue that list of skills, education and work experience could bias the assessment as well. There's no clear-cut line here that separates relevant from irrelevant. Sometimes even gender is relevant. For example clerks in grocery stores are mostly women and there are bunch of good business reasons for that (even if they are based on stupid social biases, those biases still are real and business value can be extracted from them). Also, once a shop commits to a particular gender choice, it might be inclined to stick to it exclusively. For instance, I heard a first-hand story from a local grocery store about why exactly it avoids hiring men (especially attractive ones) for clerks - because it leads to relationships forming between co-workers, which usually end with people left jealous and/or angry at each other. I can't really blame that shop for this choice, it is a rational one. I'm not responsible for hiring decisions right now, but if I were then one thing I wouldn't want to be anonymized are names. I do believe in the concept of maintaining blacklists against well known cheaters, spammers and other evil doers, and anonymizing names makes you unable to discriminate people by level-of-assholiness ;).

epochwolf 13y ago
> I can't really blame that shop for this choice, it is a rational one. Allow me. It's illegal for an employer to discriminate against applicants based on gender when it doesn't serve a direct business purpose. (Actors, Models, Priests, etc.) While I can sympathize and understand their reasons, I can not condone their solution.
- gohrt 13y ago
  And this is why Abercrombie&Fitch has no cashiers, only "models". You can't legislate away reality...
saraid216 13y ago
This is one of the two-way street issues. There is real business value to be extracted from exploiting the existing sexism in society, agreed, but in doing so, it also reinforces that existing sexism. It's a vicious cycle of mutually supporting behavior. That is a problem. Denying said value is not necessarily the best solution, but some solution is necessary.

drpgq 13y ago

I moved to Germany to work from Canada after finishing grad school and was amazed to find applicants put pictures on resumes there. Ironically later we made an attractiveness estimator and I suggested we use it to screen somebody applying for a secretary position (I was only joking and actually more pointing out the ridiculousness of having photos on resumes).

orff 13y ago
... and not only pictures. it is standard to include your birthday and nationality in your CV in Germany. And sometimes, the early career applicants adds the employers of their PARENTS in their CVs !!!
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  Maybe it's actually because people are less afraid of discrimination there? So they don't have to play it safe.
- claudius 13y ago
  Sure, why not? Birthday might not be absolutely relevant, but allows to judge your success at school/uni/education much more easily, nationality is relevant to decide whether they would have to go through trouble to get you employed (if non-European), and the employers/jobs of your parents usually correlate strongly with your own qualifications, at least on a quantitative level. Whether you like the fact that a surprisingly large number of university student has academics for parents, it is still there, and if you want an intelligent person, it might act as a decent filter to look for intelligent parents, especially is said person does not have much experience otherwise yet.
- drpgq 13y ago
  Wow never heard the parents' employers. It's worse than I thought.

jrarredondo 13y ago

At some point you do have the phone screen though.

lukevdp 13y ago

Wouldn't that just make the discrimination (conscious or unconscious) happen later? Sooner or later they will find out the gender of the applicant.

wizzard 13y ago

I believe Monster.com allows you to do this; there is an option to hide your contact info and only allow recruiters to contact you through the site. This is ostensibly to allow you to apply for new jobs without being discovered by your current job. I would imagine many job sites provide this feature.

lumens 13y ago

Unfortunately, the vast majority of HR departments (even the 'best') aren't doing this at all. My company, Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com https://www.mightyspring.com), is doing exactly this on a larger scale: we're a marketplace that connects people and employers, but the employers see anonymized versions of each candidate's data/career history. They request to interview candidates on the platform based on these anonymous profiles. Should the candidate accept, we reveal contact information to both parties and help schedule the interview. While we're still fairly early stage, we're aiming to expose bias at different points in the hiring process using this approach, and at the very least help employers understand their own biases. Acceptance is the first step to a solution, no?

jack-r-abbit 13y ago
It would be great to see this more. It could provide some interesting data. I would be interested to hear if anonymized resumes closed the gender gap for getting an interview or not. It could also expose a possible bias if the gender gap closed for getting a first interview but then the gap simply shifted up one level when it came to the second step of the process (ie, disproportionately more men move on to a second interview). Although, it might actually be harder to show a bias at that level since a lot of the interview process has to do with how well the person sells themselves, articulates their answers, presents themselves physically (ie, dressed appropriately), etc. These things also happen to be very subjective so it is kind of difficult to prove there was a bias. Which is also why it is equally difficult to prove there was not a bias. (Did you not get hired because of your gender? Or just because you didn't interview well?) I have no doubt that people get turned down based on unimportant "qualifications" like gender, race, age, etc. And that is wrong. But I also have no doubt that some people who felt they were turned down for one of those reason actually just wasn't qualified or blew the interview and don't think to look internally before they look around them.