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Comment by smallnamespace | Hacker News Reader

Or just make the entirely hiring process completely gender and race blind by hiding the name and salient biographical details of the applicant.

This solves two problems: 1) the hiring process is blinded and 2) you can demonstrate to the whole world that it's blinded.

As a side bonus, you get to eliminate other implicit biases that are part of the hiring process, like people preferring people who act like them.

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But you don't get to account for systematic bias, such as who has had opportunities and encouragement to even apply in the first place.

But practically speaking, the hiring process is not the right place to rectify those disparities.

Fix problems at the source, don't apply hack after hack to route around it.

Which source? Systematic problems have no current source; the causal graph is densely connected, so fixing those issues has to happen at all fronts.

I completely agree, which is precisely why I think believe the role of the employment process ought to be to screen everyone by fair (in a way that everyone agrees on) and transparent metrics. 'All fronts' hopefully means fixing every issue encountered simultaneously at the local level.

If instead we're adding a 'fudge factor' based on race, gender, or other measure of 'privilege', we're just hoping that fudge factor in hiring makes up for problems elsewhere, and it can paradoxically make things even worse.

Think about a lot of the (often very well justified) complaints that minority and other hires have with the current situation: they feel like, or they feel that other people believe, that they are simply a 'diversity hire' that doesn't deserve to be there. They feel constantly pressured to 'prove themselves' under the suspicion that the bar was 'lowered to let them in'. And the entire structure of un-blinded affirmative action exacerbates the situation, because nobody is allowed to know how big the fudge factors are, neither the minorities nor the dominant group. Under that situation, how can there anything but suspicion and mutual distrust?

Under a provably blinded hiring process, none of those should be an issue, because the process is completely transparent and agreed to ahead of time.

Other people have said this much more eloquently than me:

https://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/05/12/the-amazing-1969-pro...

'Fair & transparent' and 'blind' are two different things, and neither are subsets of each other.

A 'blind' hiring process _can_ be akin to, faced with a densely connected graph, focusing only on the most immediate causal relationships.

I do agree that 'fudge factor's are clumsy at best, where all candidates are hired, and then an arbitrary number is added to candidates based on race/gender/etc.

However, 'fudge factors' have already existed in history. For a completely different example outside of hiring practices: redlining[1] was an explicit practice of denying services/mortgages to city neighborhood based on its racial makeup.

So, what now? There have been decades of racist 'fudge-factoring' in real estate and urban development. Is the right approach to fudge-factor the other way? Or is it to be 'blind' and to look purely at the financials of each individual/organization?

Obviously this is a different scenario than hiring, and cannot necessarily be directly applied back onto hiring practices. However, we can separate out a) one way to correct for historical/systematic 'fudge factors' from b) whether or not this can apply to hiring.

I would argue that yes, you need fudge factors to correct previous problems.

It should be fair and transparent, I agree, but it will not be very clear-cut. In complex systems (densely connected graphs of causality), the only clear-cut processes are creating problems, or ignoring them. Fixing complex problems are always messy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

> 'Fair & transparent' and 'blind' are two different things, and neither are subsets of each other.

This is true if you consider a single subject, but no longer true if you consider different stakeholders and their needs separately.

(Disclaimer, this describes part of a service we provide)

Specific to your point, in a hiring system modelled like ours:

* Employees assessing a particular hire can operate blind (or near-blind in the case of interviews).

* Hiring managers can have access to identifying information (but by default just see aggregated scoring data).

* D&I managers can see aggregated demographic stats.

* Candidates see their own data & scoring info

As many people have pointed out before, making the hiring process blind doesn't do what you seem to think it'll do. There was a famous study (can't find it right this second on mobile) where researchers found that the ratio of black hires to white hires decreased when their resumes were submitted with all identifying information scrubbed.

Well, orchestras introduced blinded auditions in the 1970s, when there very few women, and now women are the majority in most orchestras.

So why do you think there is such a disparity in outcome?

I don't know the answer but if I cared to guess, it might be because the talent pool for orchestra performers had significantly more gender parity than the talent pool competing for elite engineering jobs at Google.

Edit: Google says that their diversity platform is non-discriminatory because they're not changing their standards, but rather looking harder for qualified diversity candidates (paraphrasing). This makes the gargantuan and probably unwarranted assumption that there are a lot of these candidates not applying and that 'looking harder' will find them.

Maybe there is pressure to hire from minority groups then. It makes sense that minority candidates are on average less qualified objectively if there is an affirmative action earlier in the process (for example at school admission level).

The results of studies like this depend strongly on the context... both the method used, and the existing hiring environment you're comparing to.

We've run a similar study and for the company we were hiring into we found blinding in that specific case had no effect on race or gender but drastically improved socio-economic diversity. The hiring company already had equitable hiring on gender & the candidate group wasn't racially diverse enough to make a conclusion.

Would I generalise that result to all organisations? No way, and neither should you.

If you can find the study you're thinking of I'd be interested to look at it.

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