Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women

Re:Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias ... by zimablue on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @05:51PM (#18189235)

I wasn't around two generations ago to make the comparison but I imagine that with the higher income has come much higher expectations that you'll be in the office for 12 hours a day and weekends. You also have much higher wealth in western nations which correlates with higher ability to seek jobs that fit your preferences. Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions. There are hundreds of ways the world and job are very different, and you're flipping the argument to say that I have to assert the one specific causal link. If you're proposing an argument "it's misogynist culture, as evidence compare two generations ago". Then it's more the case that you need to demonstrate that the conditions and job are the same, for your link to be valid. Or that all the ways they're different are irrelevant, which they're just obviously not.

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Re:Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias ... by gspetr on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @09:00PM (#18190286)

> Back in the day most people didn't go to uni and had a much smaller choice of positions.

Not the parent and I wasn't around either, but I think accessibility of education counters your point, not supports it.

More egalitarianism should in theory be more favorable to women.

Back then I imagine it was much harder to program without access to university computers and education materials.

More women get higher education than men compared to 35 years ago.

More incentives (monetary and otherwise), combined with lower barriers to entry should also be favoring the supposedly disadvantaged.

And yet the drop in F-M ratio since late 1980s has not been overcome last time I checked.

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Re:Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias ... by zimablue on Thursday October 11, 2018 @06:16AM (#18192228)

More egalitarianism should be favorable to women /if/ you assume a priori that they are mostly disadvantaged through lack of access to education/resources, and the real expected outcome distribution is 50-50.

If you assume that there are underlying differences in interests and aptitude, more egalitarianism allows these differences to be expressed more since women are more free to eg. choose a career working with people, like medicine or law. http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl... It also raises the bar for inherent aptitude to get into/(the top of) a career, since you're competing against a much wider pool of talent.

The point I was making to the parent was that his point "cross-generation drop in ratio proves it's cultural" doesn't hold up, because there have been many changes across those generations, you're comparing apples to oranges.

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Re:Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias ... by beat on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @07:31PM (#18189852)

Nonsense. I don't know where you work, but where I work, 12 hour days and weekends are clearly not the norm. We put in 40 hour weeks like any other profession.

I first learned to program 35 years ago. It wasn't fundamentally different then. Hell, we still use programming languages that were in wide use 35 years ago, like C and the unix shell. The kind of thinking required hasn't changed.

So, based on my 35 years of experience, the conditions and the job are basically the same. So again, I challenge you - how is the job different now?

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Re:Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias ... by zimablue on Thursday October 11, 2018 @06:30AM (#18192285)

The parent conceded we're talking 50 years not 35 years, and my point wasn't only that the job is different but that society is different.

how is the job different? The pay is much higher and so are the entry requirements, that's the biggest difference. You don't get assigned to program punch cards as part of your secretarial role, you have to actively get educated and good to choose it as a career.

I think there's far more places now expecting crazy hours but that's anecdotal I don't have numbers on it. But the languages are different (mostly), the tooling is different, the deployment is different, the scale is different.

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