Comment by boohoo123
2 months ago
There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the isle.
Everything is easy until you account for the real world.
A disabled person who has to request accommodations for the application process will immediately be outed for having a disability. The same applies for people who speak different languages.
Beyond that, the application is only one place in which discrimination occurs.
- It also happens during interviews which are much harder to anonymize. - It also happens in testing and requirements that, while not directly correlated to job performance, do serve to select specific candidates. - It also happens on the job, which can lead to a field of work not seeming like a safe option for some people. - It also happens in education, which can prevent capable people from becoming qualified.
Lowering the bar is not the right answer (unless it is artificially high) but neither is pretending that an anonymous resume will fix everything.
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Many (or most) vision, hearing and speech impairments would likely be disqualifying for ATC; if they were to the point of needing accomidation during an interview. Mobility impairments would likely be able to be reasonably accomidated though; someone without use of their legs could work in an ATC facility that can be accessed without stairs, which would exclude some towers but not all of them. The workstation height may need to be adjustable as well, but that's not an unreasonable accomidation either.
> A disabled person should probably not be manning ATC.
This depends upon the disability and what reasonable accommodations could be made.
Let's see. The OP didn't specify they were talking about the ATC, I gave two examples of ways you could de-anonimyze resumes in the normal application process; I'm sure there's others. And glad to hear you don't think people with cancer or those who use wheelchairs should be allowed to work at the ATC, I guess.
The FAA were already not allowed to ask employees about their demographics. The article you're commenting on states that the actual problem was that the FAA added a new biographical questionnaire to the ATC hiring process, which had strangely weighted questions and a >90% fail rate. Applicants who failed the questionnaire were rejected with no chance to appeal. Employees at the FAA then leaked the correct answers to the questionnaire to student members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees to work around the fact that they couldn't directly ask applicants for their race. Here's a replica of the questionnaire if you're interested: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
My company's DEI program effectively does this. The main tenets are:
- Cast a wide recruiting net to attract a diverse candidate pool
- Don't collect demographic data on applications
- Separate the recruiting / interview process from the hiring committee
- The hiring committee only sees qualifications and interview results; all identifying info is stripped
- Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result
- If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting
The separation allows candidates to request special accommodations from the interview team if needed, without that being a factor to the committee making the final decision.
Overall, our workforce is much more skilled and diverse than anywhere else I've worked.
> Our guardrail is the assumption that our hiring process is blind, and our workforce demographics should closely mirror general population demographics as a result
> If our demographics start to diverge, we re-eval our process to look for bias or see if we can do better at recruiting
These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 20% of pediatricians are men? If you saw a hospital that had 50% male pediatricians, that means they're hiring male pediatricians at 4x the rate of women. That's pretty strong evidence that female candidates aren't being given equal employment opportunity.
A past company of mine had practices similar to yours. The way it achieved gender diversity representative of the general population in engineering roles (which were only ~20% women in the field) was by advancing women to interviews at rates much higher than men. The hiring committee didn't see candidates' demographics so this went unknown for quite some time. But the recruiters choosing which candidates to advance to interviewing did, and they used tools like census data on the gender distribution of names to ensure the desired distribution of candidates were interviewed. When the recruiters onboarding docs detailing all those demographic tools were leaked it caused a big kerfuffle, and demands for more transparency in the hiring pipeline.
I'd be very interested in what the demographic distribution of your applicants are, and how they compare against the candidates advanced to interviews.
Yea when I have done hiring the vast majority of applicants were of specific races and demographics. It isn’t a private companies’ job to skew hiring outcomes away from the demographics of the incoming pool of qualified applicants. If you have 95% female applicants for a position I would expect that roughly 95% of hires are going to be female and vice versa.
I think it is damaging when hiring outcomes are skewed as well as it undermines the credibility of those who got hired under easier conditions fabricated by the company.
I too agree with the grandparent post that we should try to be scrubbing PII from applications as much as possible. I do code interviews at BIGCO and for some reason recruiting sends me the applicants resume which is totally irrelevant to the code interview and offers more opportunities for biases to slip in (i.e this person went to MIT vs this person went to no name community college).
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> These are not good assumptions. 80% of pediatricians are women. Why would a hospital expect to hire 50% male pediatricians when only 20% of pediatricians are men? If you saw a hospital that had 50% male pediatricians, that means they're hiring male pediatricians at 4x the rate of women. That's pretty strong evidence that female candidates aren't being given equal employment opportunity.
We track these, but don't establish guardrails on that fine grained of data.
In your example, it would be balanced by a likely over-representation in urology by male doctors. But when looking at doctors overall, the demographics tend to balance out, with the understanding that various factors may affect specific practices.
To give you a more solid answer, in our data we see that men are a bit overrepresented in our platform engineering roles, while women are within our data science and ML roles. General backend/frontend roles are fairly balanced. Overall engineering metrics roughly fit out guardrails. We look at the same for management, leadership, sales, and customer support.
I don't have direct data on the recruitment -> interview process on hand. I work on the interviewing side though, and can tell you anecdotally that I've run dozens of interviews and overall haven't noticed a discrepancy in the candidates I've seen. I can also say that of those dozens, I think I've only advanced 2 candidates to the hiring committee. So we seem to err on sending a candidate to interview vs trying to prematurely prune the pool down.
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notice how these solution requires a dedication to diversity throughout the process from candidate sourcing to interviewing and all the way through, and not some simple cut and paste answers.
The road to a more inclusive solution is dedicated effort, with continuous re-assessment at every step. There is no magical answer.
> Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that.
Doing so doesn't hurt. In my college, exams and coursework were graded this way.
Unfortunately with resumes it isn't so easy. If I tell you I attended Brigham Young University, my hobby is singing in a male voice choir, and I contributed IDE CD-RW drive support to the Linux kernel - you can probably take a guess at my demographics.
They could replace the university name with things like the university's median SAT admissions score, and admissions rate.
Previous work experience is relevant to the job, so it'd be hard to argue removing that information, and working on older technology does imply a minimum age. Though I guess theoretically one could be a retro computing enthusiaist.
Blind hiring in practice that reduces diversity. [1]
Draw from that what conclusions you may.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
The E in DEI stands for Equity, not Equality. The explicit, stated goal is not to remove discrimination it's to discriminate in order to reach Equity.
For every difficult and complex problem, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution.
Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.
> Demographics questions on job applications do not get shown to recruiters nor interviewers.
But Recruiters can glean this information from names and other information on resumes. And yes, many do deliberately try to use this information to decide who to interview. Recruiters at one of me previous employers linked to US census data on the gender distribution of names in their onboarding docs. They also created spreadsheets of ethnically affiliated fraternities/sororities and ethnic names.
This is literally one of the things DEI programs push to implement. I have a friend who helps make hiring decisions and this is one of the changes their DEI push included, as well as pulling from a larger pool.
It just shows how much propaganda there is around DEI, you're saying we should get rid of DEI and replace it with the things DEI was trying to do. It really has become the new critical race theory.
It really depends on what the outcome is. There has been pro-DEI pushback on blind interviews and auditions when it resulted in fewer minorities being represented. One particularly famous case is when GitHub shut down their conference on diversity grounds after the blind paper review process resulted in a speaker slate that was all male. For another example, here's a pitch against blind auditions for orchestras to "make them more diverse": https://archive.is/iH2uh
In both those examples, why are you not giving the benefit of the doubt to the failed attempts?
If GitHub attempted to anonymize applications and resulted in a biased selection, can that not be a result of them failing to eliminate the bias they set out to?
Same with the blind auditions for orchestras, if they found that they weren't actually eliminating bias with the stated methods, why is it bad that they're not doing it anymore?
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Agreed. However Progressives argue (wrongly in my opinion) that taking into account a person’s race and gender identity is the only wait to guard against discrimination. They explicitly regard ‘merit’ based hiring as racist and discriminatory.
Who is this "progressive" that for some reason is only allowed to speak in the most general of statements and not make claims backed up with evidence?
A lot of people seem to be arguing against caricatures of arguments either they or people theg trust have instilled in them, and not actual points being made by actual people...
I read your post three times and I still can’t parse it. If you’re asking which Progressives are making the arguments I described, go see Ibram Kendi among others. I am not caricaturing their position. This is what they believe.
This assumes that the hiring managers or whoever are honest people who are not racist or bigoted in any manner and only display incidental racism or subconscious bias. If I see a HBCU as an applicant's alma matter, it's almost certain that they are black.
Correct, and that's why hiding the fact that the candidate attended an HBCU would avert that kind of bias.
So no colleges and universities on resumes?
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So easy. Should we also remove college attended or extracurriculars to avoid flagging potential demographic details like attending an HBCU?
> There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application.
For job applications? (How) do you also hide their appearance in the interview?
IT's not so simple. Eventually there will be an interview and the person scoring the interview may have some bias.
And as someone else points out, some schools like HBCU have names that carry racial coding.
The real key is to stop reporting those characteristics of the workforce.
>There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice.
Yes! Build a robust economy so that everyone can have dignified work that pays a living wage, rendering any kind of hiring preferences moot.
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