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Comment by memedtodeath | Hacker News Reader

When the Australian public service experimented with blinding demographic data on resumes, fewer women and minorities were hired:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...

A blind recruiting process only increases diversity if there exists significant bias against diverse candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if Silicon Valley has a bias in favor of diverse candidates, like Australia's public service.

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And I think that this is the bind that Google and others are finding themselves in: the assumption is prejudice so they make honest and effective efforts to combat prejudice and don't get the desired result in terms of outcomes.

See the example of the GitHub-sponsored conference whose trial of blind reviewing resulted in zero women speakers.

So Google is getting hammered from two sides, on the one hand they're getting sued because the outcomes are not what they're supposed to be, on the other hand they are already doing diversity programs that at least skirt or already dip into illegal practices. (In his interviews, James Damore has mentioned secretive diversity session that were not recorded, unlike everything else at Google, and that told of practices such as quotas that to him seemed extremely sketchy or downright illegal)

Of course this goes back to Pinker's comment in his debate with Elizabeth Spelke that we must distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex from the empirical claim that males and females are (biologically) indistinguishable, because distinguishing them is actually essential to protecting the core of feminism. Because if you don't distinguish and it turns out that your empirical proposition is false, you must then either (a) discriminate or (b) distort/suppress the truth, or both. And that appears to be exactly what is happening.

https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.htm...

UPDATE: Google's Diversity Efforts Fall Flat -- https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-l...

You have an excellent point, but your use of the phrase "diverse candidates" misses the concern that the most important diversity is in thought and culture, not just predetermined demographics. A "diverse candidate" in reality may not look like an official "diversity candidate".

Another question is what makes you think that all whites think the same and therefore it will narrow the spectrum of ideas?

This assumption is never discussed and always accepted as true.

Why is that? Why are all the whites (or white males) identical in their thinking?

It's clearly not true. Hiring a Slavic man would, in abstract, be an increase in diversity in a lot of shops. They're likely Caucasian, though. One response is that it's important to officially value historically disadvantaged groups, but many Slavic groups are historically disadvantaged.

So, in a weird way, diversity initiatives come from a very ethnocentric (American) perspective.

Note that men and women typically present themselves differently on CVs and in selection criteria, with men typically giving themselves credit for work done in teams while women typically talk about the teams they were part of.

This would easily explain why blind resumes resulted in a larger proportion of men being selected.

edit: to contrast with the orchestra scenario, a resume is not a skill test, while an audition for an orchestra is a skill test for exactly the type of skill that the candidate is being chosen for.

Interesting hypothesis, but apparently not what happened:

"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview.

Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door."

http://abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to...

It's an interesting result, but is it accurate to call this "blinding"?

I feel like hiding demographics and actively deceiving people about demographics are different processes and should have different names?

Calling it "blinding" might not be accurate but, if anything, using deception, the study showed that men were discriminated against, not women -- contrary to what the initial hypothesis suggested.

Given "men typically giving themselves credit for work done in teams while women typically talk about the teams they were part of", then if you see a female CV it's more likely to be understated than if you see a male one. Which predicts two things:

* People aware of this will prefer otherwise identical CVs with female names (expectation is the underlying candidate is stronger, just more modest)

* Blind hiring will get you more men (because hiring managers can't correct for the male/female difference in self promotion anymore)

See, that is what is known as "sexism".

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