Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring(hai.stanford.edu) |
Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring(hai.stanford.edu) |
> 30% of Black applicants apply to at least one position that demonstrates adverse impact against Black applicants.
The whole thing reads like a tautology.
I tried it before, and discrimination is there, I would get one resume rejected quickly and few days later the same company would invite another resume for a screening call. I tried this before and after AI hype, results weren’t that different btw, and that was tested in US and Canada employers only.
Hypothetical SAT score: 1060
How does that help you predict the race of an individual applicant? It's been a while since I took the SAT, but I didn't realize one's score provided so much information.
The paper's conclusion, that we need to study this more, is showing the authors likely believe this to be a byproduct of inherent/invisible bias.
(I assume they're just using a big LLM for this, it doesnt say, it just says "AI" when they say "AI like that they usually mean LLM".. A custom trained hiring ML system would be better)
Some people just can't help but put their biases on display at every opportunity, even when it comes to the most minute details.
The phrase "most-favored" means, "most recommended by the AI relative to the field".
What did you think this sentence meant?
> There is no such thing as anti-white racism.
If you find yourself wanting to disagree with that then, I'm sorry but you simply don't know what racism is. Racism is pervasive, insidious and systemic.
A good example in the hiring space is what's called the "second syllable name problem". Traditionally Afrcian names often stress the second syllable (eg Jamal, Lakisha, Malik, Lashonda). Studies have shown that such names have higher rejection rates in job applications [1]. So if you're wondering about the four-fifths rule, it's because it exposes this kind of bias. It's not proof of bias. It simply means further investigation is required.
The problem with AI hiring tools is the logic is opaque. You have no idea why an AI system is rejecting or selecting candidates and you may find it's doing something illegal. Some companies want to hide behind this opaqueness, arguing that if no explicit decision was made then there is no bias. But that's not how system racism works.
There are many such signals that correlate with race that if they affect selection rate, it could be a problem. Did you go to an HBCU? Was your high school in a minority-majority area? What about your previous employers?
This kind of bias doesn't have to be intentional.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-...
> If you find yourself wanting to disagree with that then, I'm sorry but you simply don't know what racism is.
You are saying that if you think anti-white racism can exist, you don't know what racism is. That's obviously ludicrous.
Too many of these studies only focus on percentages and the end result is unqualified candidates getting hired from minority groups at the expense of qualified ones.
The authors are saying it's worth doing more research, because in a controlled data set the results appear unbalanced.
Looks like you didn't read the paper. There are no resumes involved. It is about assessment games.
Happy to share some sample reports if anyone is interested!
If we move to using just a small number of AI models to help do things like hiring, we will amplify biases and possibly completely lock out portions of the population. We need to be very careful when using AI systems to evaluate people in general -- not because they might be biased (which they might be), but because even a small bias, if used by virtually everyone, can be damning.
However, "this AI model can decide that some subset of people, perhaps random, perhaps not, are simply not hirable for any job" makes sense to most people regardless of political bent.
> Our research also found that this pattern does not appear to be the case in other circumstances. We analyzed data from the largest prior study of hiring decisions, which sent 83,000 applications to 108 Fortune 500 firms during the same time period as our study and did not focus on whether AI was used to make decisions. We found that the rate at which applicants were rejected from every firm they applied to in this data was no higher than what you’d expect if each company decided independently of the others.
It sounds like this study was using real-world applicants, and the other study they're comparing against was using synthetic applicants.
Consider the chance of being accepted as being composed of signal+bias+noise. Noise is random. Signal is a per-applicant value, and what's meant to be measured. Bias is a per-group value, and an artifact of the measuring process.
If acceptance/rejection is independent between positions applied for (as in the synthetic applicant study), that suggests that it's random or composed entirely of noise; ie there is no signal; ie the applicants are all equally qualified.
If acceptance/rejection is correlated, that means there is some nonzero amount of (signal+bias). But real-world applicants are not all identical, so there should be some amount of signal. So you can't just assume zero signal in order to infer that there must be bias.
We find applicants are more likely to be rejected from every position they apply to than would be predicted by the baseline of each position making statistically independent decisions.
Obviously a rejected resume is more likely to be rejected by every other employer and an accepted resume is more likely to be accepted by every other employer. Like online dating, most employers are looking for some baseline indicators that you are going to be successful and stable.
This makes sense to me, albeit intuitively and in a way I can't articulate.
> an accepted resume is more likely to be accepted by every other employer
but this doesn't necessarily follow from the prior for me. Plenty of people get really good jobs and are really successful in them only after dozens or hundreds of rejections with a nearly-identical resume.
Actually the fact that they found this result didn’t hold in a different dataset is especially weird.
Definitely open to opposing or critical views
I'm not saying AI is not biased, but this study does not prove that.
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.27371
From the paper:
> Fig. 1. The pymetrics process. > Stage 1: Applicants apply to positions. > Stage 2: Applicants are directed to the pymetrics platform to play assessment games. > Stage 3: pymetrics algorithms use applicant gameplay features to recommend 58.2% of applicants per position on average. > Stage 4: Employers decide which applicants to interview or hire, typically rejecting applicants that were not recommended by pymetrics.
High-risk – AI applications that are expected to pose significant threats to health, safety, or the fundamental rights of persons. Notably, AI systems used in health, education, recruitment, critical infrastructure management, law enforcement or justice. They are subject to quality, transparency, human oversight and safety obligations
That's a pretty common sense legislation to me.
Of all the things listed "recruitment" doesn't belong to me. Is the argument that it is someone's fundamental human right to get someone else to pay them to do a job? Or is it strictly about human oversight?
That seems like a nonsensical way to measure racial discrimination. What could justify it?
Screened Applications [13]
Unscreened Applications [39148]https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/california-judge-upho...
"Cards held by African-American sellers sold for approximately 20% ($0.90) less than cards held by Caucasian sellers, and the race effect was more pronounced in sales of minority player cards."
>If the AI had recommended Black and Asian candidates at the same rate as it recommended the most-favored group (typically white applicants), 40,000 more of their applications would have advanced to the next stage of hiring.
I don't think this is the right benchmark here, or at least, it would be very interesting if the actual outcome, offer or rejected, was considered at the end.
For the AI study real data from "3.4 million people who submit 4 million job applications to 1,700 job postings across 150 employers and 11 industry sectors" was used.
They find "disparate impact" of pymetrics across racial groups, but it doesn't seem like they controlled for anything.
AI works by learning patterns. So it will become bias by just learning from factors like education history, schools attended, employment history, ZIP codes, or geographic location. Those 3 factors alone are an easy proxy for race.
And if you add names into the equation (if the AI was trained without removing applicant names), the model can become even more bias.
I guess this one just compounds.
> We follow 3.4 million people who submit 4 million job applications to 1,700 job postings across 150 employers and 11 industry sectors. Each job application was assessed by an AI hiring tool built by a single third-party vendor.
3.4 million people applying to just 150 employers... Who are all using just 1 platform. WTF. This is where the discrimination is happening. Why the f do 3.4 million people feel forced to apply to just 150 employers and why the f do all these 150 employers feel forced to use just one platform. WTF.
I see nothing that shows any system was making a decision on race. How is the race being presented to the AI?
All this is showing from what I can see, is that certain groups of people were more often denied a next step in the process - but why?
Was the AI going by spelling and grammar? Were there names that were different but the rest of the resume was exactly the same? Were there pictures?
There were mentions that the rate of each group may be more prominent in the data when you split apart different types of jobs instead of all jobs in aggregate.. One could read that like it's inferred; that more warehouse jobs are offered to a race and less admin jobs.. but that same would happen if AI was more focused on perfect grammar for one job and it was not as much of a factor for a warehouse job.
Also if the people applying for the various jobs were self selecting, acceptance percentages this would skew things based upon which ones were applied / not applied to right?
There are so many ways you could draw conclusions like this from data, however correlation is not causation, yet this seems to say it is.
I feel this is an important thing to watch, but Stanford may not be the place to trust with 'Policy Recommendations' as it's very unclear there is any proof that 'AI Hiring Tools Yield Racial Bias and Systemic Rejection' from this study and paper.
PS - now that I see the HN title did not have the word "can" in it, and the title of the article is actually "Tools Can Yield" - maybe that is less accusing and more noting.
Only 40% self report gender/race
no resume data, no education information, degrees, schools, GPA, major, work experience, skills/certifications
Zero job qualifications
I would be surprised if the results were different.
:)
If you click through, the paper says the race is self-reported.
“Our data tracks 4,197,168 applications. It includes applicant gameplay features and for each application, the application date, the position name and employer, metadata about the position and employer, and the numerical score and final recommendation each applicant received for each completed application. 40.2% of applicants self-report race with a breakdown of 16.8% Asian, 14.2% White, 3.6% Black, 3.0% Hispanic, and all other racial categories below 2% (i.e. fewer than 100,000 applicants).”
its going to be in the rest of the data because race has a meaningful correlation, and pleanty of causation with being disadvantaged in real ways, that can also affect the ability to then do certain jobs.
like, the environmental pollution and building interstates and freeways through black communities, on purpose to do bad things to those communities, then results in a bunch of noise and particulate pollution, that is bad for developing brains.
you wont be able to do some meritocratic non-racist hiring without fixing the environmental racism. otherwise youre just mirroring racism other people built for you
The dataset is constructed, deliberately, to hold candidate performance constant and vary the names of candidates to appear to be associated with a specific race.
But they picked 9 family names per group. Which sounds quite low. And combined that with first names to reach 500 first+last names per group.
I wonder how much of the bias we see has to do with the names actually picked versus it being racially motivated (absolutely not denying that this probably is a factor, but might not be the only one).
For example, in France there is the national BAC end of high school exam. If you you at the names X grade distribution, and look at the higher “very good” bracket: some names are heavily under-represented (less than 5% of say “Jordan” get that grade) while some are over-represented (35% of “Josephine” get such a grade). The exam is for the most part anonymous, but some names are definitely heavily correlated with lower/higher income groups. So nothing surprising: Josephines tend to come from richer families, thus in average get better education/support, thus better grades. Same thing is true with family names to a smaller extent.
So I wonder how much of the bias we see, be it from real persons or the AI has more to do with a class thing than a racial thing. Again those are not neatly separate things, but still
Cool.
In any event, I'd happily support a ban on all parts of the ATS that could be involved in automated approval, rejection, or scoring being able to see candidate names. But I sense the author of this has a bigger agenda.
It indicates there may be adverse impact to one group. It specifically is not used to resolve racial discrimination.
It's purely a signal for "we should consider asking more questions, because this appears unusual". That's what your quote says too, it "flags" a low recommendation -- it's indicating further study and investigation is likely warranted.
"Adverse impact occurs when there is (i) practically and (ii) statistically significant disparities in the selection rate for the group of interest when compared against the selection rate ′ of the most selected group ′ . Practical significance requires the impact ratio ... to be less than 0.8, which is why the EEOC guidance is colloquially referred to as the 'four-fifths' rule."
The headline numbers reflect the positions for which the 4/5 rule was triggered, not the result of some further investigation: “We discovered that 26% of Black applicants and 15% of Asian applicants applied to positions where the AI system discriminated against their racial group.” Based on the methodology, I think that means that 26% of black applicants applied to positions that were flagged under the 4/5ths rule.
it sounds like how you'd get that kind of metric at least
This doctrine is the basis for much of employment law. It is a significant reason why employers don't administer IQ tests (or equivalents) to screen candidates since ~the 90s.
A common objection to the doctrine is that it leads to unfalsifiable discrimination claims, which is why it seems nonsensical to you.
If the issue happens upstream of the defendant to a claim - generally an organization being sued by an individual with fewer resources - it incentivizes such entities to push for changes upstream, so that they don't get stuck with the bill.
The assumption that applicants from all races are on average equally qualified for every position. Whole subfields of modern academia are based on that assumption.
Here's some analysis of what it is and why it's useful as a canary in the coal mine: https://www.prevuehr.com/resources/insights/adverse-impact-a...
> Since the 80% test does not involve probability distributions to determine whether the disparity is a “beyond chance” occurrence, it is usually not regarded as a definitive test for adverse impact. Instead, other statistically significance tests, such as the standard deviation analysis, may be used for this purpose.
But then my question recurs: isn’t this a ridiculous way to measure discrimination? It’s assuming that the only thing that differs between the different ethnic applicant pools is their ethnicity, which is essentially never going to be true.
Like. If I am evaluating a developer on lines of code written, I am a bad manager. But if an engineer has 40% fewer lines of code than the team median, it's absolutely ok for me to go, "Interesting. What's the story there? Are they slower or is there some other factor?"
Same idea -- this is purely a fast, first pass metric that can quickly assess if something warrants a deeper evaluation.
If you are trying to say "more data needed, headline misleading" you should say that instead of misrepresenting the 4/5ths rule. Also the word "can" implies uncertainty of conclusion. This isn't ridiculous, the authors point out that this is the first large scale study of this topic. Nothing has been "proven" here, it's showing that this warrants further investigation and attention.
Do you read many academic papers, because you seem to be having a rough go here.
Individuals are qualified or unqualified. If a company happens to end up with less than 1/4 Ravenclaws or not very many Virgos, it doesn't mean hate is a reason. It could be that the Ravenclaws that applied were a bit less qualified than those from the other houses.
I guess my point is, doing the statistical analysis for race and gender and drawing conclusions, while being completely blind to the one single factor any sane hiring manager should be focusing on -- actual qualifications for the role -- doesn't make any sense.
Don't claim AI is discriminating against non–selects, though.
I doubt companies are using Gr*k to make their hiring decisions.
If you're making the claim you need to provide the evidence.
Most people would say that a persistent disparity means it's possible there is discrimination, but it's not definitive proof.
There is a large body of literature concerning the question "does disparate-impact enforcement cause employers to alter hiring behavior in ways unrelated to actual productivity or discrimination?" and the answer is largely "yes". As you suggested elsewhere in this discussion, Google may be useful.
To act like it's bad that people of colour have a more fair chance of getting employed because of some piece of legislation is simply insidious. It's just been over a month since black people lost the right to a fair vote.
Literally the opposite happened. The Supreme Court ruled that there was VRA §2 liability when there was evidence of racially-motivated gerrymandering: "In short, §2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race." (Louisiana v. Callais, p. 26)
Are you suggesting that companies should violate the law here? What do you recommend?
Edit: charitably, "adhering to the letter of the law" is sometimes shortened to "law-abiding" and is generally what we want.
Prior to the beginning of your excerpt is the word "You", meaning the comment's author is the subject, not "companies". I'm saying the commenter is appealing to black letter law for the answer to the question "what happens when..." but we have observational evidence to answer the question.