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...

The first 3 digits of a SSN indicate where the child was born. While not as prejudicial an aspect, there are definitely some geographical biases among some groups.

Just a fun fact, this stopped being true as of June 25, 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Structu...

But since there probably aren't many two-year-olds applying for jobs nowadays the comment is still relevant.

Not just a fun fact, but also an informative fact.

Thank you for the update and chuckle!

Only for younger people - SSNs have only been assigned at birth since the 1980s. My mother was born in West Virginia but her SSN has a Minnesota prefix, because that's where she lived when she got her first job.

Someone who wasn't born a US citizen would only get assigned an SSN with their green card or work visa, and I'd imagine the prefix would indicate their first place of residence in the US.

So the most you can get from a pre-2011 SSN is that someone lived in some particular state in some particular year, and that information is likely inferable from the resume anyway.

I was born in the early 70's and mine was assigned at birth. In fact, when I was a teenager I ran into someone else born at the same hospital on the same day (at the time we met we were thousands of miles away living in a different city on the other side of the state, so not a high probability event). The first 6 digits of our SSNs were the same.

Children are not automatically assigned a SSN at birth.

Quoting from the Social Security office: "Must my child have a Social Security number? No. Getting a Social Security number for your newborn is voluntary. But, it is a good idea to get a number when your child is born. You can apply for a Social Security number for your baby when you apply for your baby’s birth certificate."

A couple of decades back, the law was changed to require the SSN for any claimed dependents. Most people, of course, want that ~ $4,000 deduction, so hospitals often distribute the birth registration form.

For what it's worth, I was also born in the 1970s, but didn't get my SSN until jr. high, as I recall.

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).

If the bias is subconcious, moving to this would still have an effect.

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."

It wouldn't be perfect, but most of the effect would be removed.

In general, it could be enforced as a random identifier generated with each electronic application; this just burdens employers with implementing an electronic applications system, which is too high a regulatory burden (and would make dropping off a CV in person impossible/illegal, which is stupid.)

It could be a hash of the persons name, too, but then the public would have to learn what a hash was...

NI number works well in the UK, because it's convenient (and the original suggestion was specifically for the UK.) A similar system could be used anywhere.

"SSN equivalent in Poland has sex encoded"

That gets supplied when sending a resume?

It's not. OP wrote about using SSN-like numbers instead of names, so I wanted to note the fact that those number can, and quite often do, encode additional information.

I guess that would put an end to linking your github account from your resume.

Considering that doing that is an invaluable tool to people lacking "real" work experience, either recently or in general, I think that could end up hurting a lot of people.

There was never any plan to restrict anything else (although if your github URL is your name, like mine, I guess it would defeat the purpose.) The point was that people often put their name (like in the article) in a large font at the top - replacing this with a faceless number just reduces the initial "put the girls and people called 'Singh' in that pile over there" nonsense, at makes people actually read the CVs.

This sounds great. I do wonder though how the batch interviews would go - it is easier to dismiss people for subconscious (or conscious) racism and sexism when they are just a voice or a piece of paper, but I can see a lot of lawsuits coming out of the HR departments in companies with less than angelic hiring practices.

Reducing discrimination seems like a good idea, but reducing everyone to semi-anonymous UIDs seems extremely dehumanizing.

> 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 ;).

> 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.

And this is why Abercrombie&Fitch has no cashiers, only "models".

You can't legislate away reality...

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.

"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 ;)"

If there was a protocol\industry agreed standard for doing hashing of names on applications, then you could still do this.

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

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.

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?

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)

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?

It wouldn't be unprecedented. Symphonies regularly use "blind auditions," with the performer behind a screen, to prevent bias (typically against women). Blind auditions significantly improved women's chances of being selected, as related by Malcolm Gladwell in 'Blink'. Here's the original study he references:

http://public.econ.duke.edu/~hf14/teaching/povertydisc/readi...

That would be excellent wherever it's feasible. The way Gladwell tells it (so take it with a grain of salt), when symphony orchestras started conducting their auditions with a screen in place so they couldn't see the person playing the instrument, the fraction of female musicians in top orchestras shot way up.

However, in cases where the quality of in-person interaction is a major part of what you're trying to assess — like for a team programming environment — it's going to be pretty hard to do anything comparable.

How important is personal interaction to most programming jobs, really?

I'd go so far as to say that it might be slightly more important than the ability to write code, depending on the company, the project, etc. Being able to effectively discuss requirements and technical tradeoffs with non-technical stakeholders is extremely valuable.

Obviously some level of programming expertise is required, but once you've crossed that minimum threshold, personal communication becomes a larger and larger share of an employees value.

Personal interaction is critical to any job unless your boss is a robot.

But what about language pattern, vocabulary and dialects? What about university names or degrees if it makes companies favor those over others that are self taught. One can put this into an absurd chain of arguments...

A telephone interview will accomplish the same thing, and reduces travel expenses to boot.

In fact telephone, or skype, interviews for the first round is actually becoming standard in many fields.

No, that's not next.

Turing Test interviews.

IRC interviews

Even that is not 100% watertight: http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php

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).

Chinese room interviews.

Where do I sign up?

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).

... 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 !!!

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.

Maybe it's actually because people are less afraid of discrimination there? So they don't have to play it safe.

Wow never heard the parents' employers. It's worse than I thought.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of HR departments (even the 'best') aren't doing this at all.

My company, Mighty Spring (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?

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.

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.

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.

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

At some point you do have the phone screen though.