News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech. Parent comment

Re:Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of ... by ingleswood on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @09:40AM (#26969219)
Isn't the existence in a more realistic hiring process of a huge weight of objective and reasonable criteria an unjustified, unlikely and politically subjective assumption?

Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias, perhaps it's more reasonable to assume that most others also involve unconscious or explained-away bias? So perhaps hiring decisions are influenced 0.01% by speech and accent, 64.99% by other class, race and gender markers, and 35% by reasonable criteria such as competence? Why wouldn't this be your base case assumption?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of ... by pedrosorio on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @11:37AM (#26970590)
> Given that one small element of interview presentation has been shown to involve irrational bias

No such thing was shown in this study. The study makes no attempt to measure E(skills | social class). For all we know, the hiring managers provided an unbiased (i.e. the opposite of "irrational bias") estimate of the expected skills conditioned on the social class of the applicant, absent any other information.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of ... by ingleswood on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @12:20PM (#26971117)
Interesting that you are claiming both that people making hiring decisions are not biased along class lines and that any such bias would be rational and based on ability.
[ Parent | on HN ]