Comment by saberience
4 years ago
You realise that someones race, age, gender, disability etc are all easily inferred as soon as you meet someone in person?
It doesn't matter what you do here, if someone wants to reject someone based on gender, race, etc, they can do so easily and just say they weren't good enough. This is the ultimate elephant in room with hiring and it's always been there and always will be unless we somehow do hiring while never talking to someone or seeing them or knowing their real-name.
Even if it wasn't expressly forbidden under law, no one was ever rejecting someone from a job "because they are black/white/female/etc/etc/", that's always been obviously wrong, but it's easy enough to simply say "They're not a culture fit." or "Not experienced enough" or "Didn't answer the technical questions well enough."
I don't think banning people's faces on resumes or CVs would fix anything, the only thing that would "fix" this is changing our implicit and unconscious biases from childhood onwards, i.e. a major change to our teaching culture, and across all the media, TV, movies, books etc.
Ten minutes ago I agreed. There is bias to be fixed, but perhaps this is not the place to do so. But then, do you really need to know their name and gender _before_ the interview? I think there is an argument here for obscuring the face and other PII from the resume and letting people clear the initial screen bias free. It of course won't cure all or the most severe forms of discrimination, but it might reduce the subconcious biases that we all have. There's certainly a level of fuzziness here, but PII seems a reasonable line to draw for the in / out.
But this is not about eradicating all opportunities for bias, it is about reducing them. Making e.g. the filtering of resumes blind to race and gender would likely improve the situation, even if e.g. the interview still provides opportunity for biases to creep in.