Comment by mklim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mklim | Hacker News Reader

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The counter argument that I've heard most is that minorities are less likely to be hired than equally qualified members of the majority because of subconscious bias. Enforcing a quota is a sort of equalizer—formal discrimination in one direction in order to push back against informal discrimination in the other direction.

I'm not completely sold on the method, but the problem of subconscious bias in hiring is very well documented:

* Resumes with stereotypically White names receive 50% more callbacks than identical resumes with traditionally black ones. The addition of honors and special skills had a significant effect on the likelihood of White applications being called, but a statistically insignificant effect for the otherwise-identical African-American ones. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf

* Applicants with male names are rated as more competent and offered higher starting salaries than identical applications with female names. Identical resumes with male names are called back more often than female ones. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf+html, http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf

* Initial subconscious bias is logically justified post-hoc—in the linked experiment, the qualities deemed necessary for a position would actually be redefined by the person reviewing resumes depending on the gender of the applicants so that the male applicant's traits fit the position better. http://www.socialjudgments.com/docs/Uhlmann%20and%20Cohen%20...

There's quite a few more papers on the subject, it's easy to search for them. Depressing read all around.

If those studies are true, then the correct solution would be to:

1) ask people not include their names on their resume. Or don't use resumes at all. Create a web form application that does not require a name and only asks about the crucial skills you actually need.

2) Create a highly objective hiring process, such as this: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

I don't really buy that subconscious bias is the problem in tech. I've been part of a lot of hiring, we were actually consciously biased toward hiring women since we wanted better numbers. I had an objective interview process, always giving the same questions, and the hiring was still very disproportionately male whasian (the applicant pool was also very disproportionately male whasian, despite doing active reach out to woman-in-tech events).

It sounds like you were trying to correct for an assumed subconscious bias of "deep down, we really want to hire men." In my experience, though, decent people like you don't have that bias. What they do have is a subconscious idea that "good candidates will look like X," where X is a mental image of a male candidate. Both women and men are subject to this bias, and it's a lot harder to correct for. Simply asking the same set of questions to all candidates won't fix it, if the questions themselves have the effect of weeding out women.

Simply asking the same set of questions to all candidates won't fix it, if the questions themselves have the effect of weeding out women.

The questions I asked were representative of things we actually had to do on the job, for instance: "write code to spider a web site." Does that unfairly weed out woman?

1. I agree, this would be preferable and a great step for the initial screener. But that leaves the problem of the actual interview—the studies that I've seen test written resumes, because it's possible to ensure that two resumes are identical except for one variable in ways that you can't ensure that two interviews are identical. But it's highly likely that the bias would carry over to any interaction with the candidates, though I don't have any studies on hand that prove it.

2. Also agree that an objective method would be preferable, thanks for the link. Great read. IIRC, in the study I link in the third bullet point, forcing the person reviewing the resume to create a rubric before reading any of them greatly reduced the biased results. Having an objective process goes a long way. The point in the link about confident interviewers performing better in the traditional hiring process is definitely true, and also tied in a roundabout way to gender, funnily enough (women tend to be less confident than men: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/the-conf...).

It's definitely not the only problem—the pipeline is obviously skewed dramatically—but I don't see any reason why tech workers would be exempt from the biases of the general population as they've been studied. Maybe the drive to hire more women would counteract it, like in your example—that's the reasoning under which minority quotas are implemented, after all. The problem of subconscious bias is that it's not consciously recognizable by its very nature. It's just gut feeling. I know a site that uses association to try to test it for you, if you're interested: http://implicit.harvard.edu/.

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