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Tag: gender bias

  • Gender Bias Lawsuit Against Google Gains Class-Action Status

    Gender Bias Lawsuit Against Google Gains Class-Action Status

    Google has been dealt a major setback, as a judge has granted class-action status to a lawsuit over alleged gender bias and pay discrimination.

    Four plaintiffs have sued Google, accusing the company of discriminating against women, paying them less than their male counterparts. Google was seeking to prevent the lawsuit from gaining class-action status, but the judge ruled the four plaintiffs could represent the 10,800 women working for Google.

    “This is a significant day for women at Google and in the technology sector, and we are so proud of our brave clients for leading the way,” Kelly Dermody, a lawyer representing the women, said in an email to Bloomberg. “This order shows that it is critical that companies prioritize paying women equitably over spending money fighting them in litigation.”

    According to the court filing, the plaintiffs claim Google paid women roughly $16,794 per year less than men in similar roles. The case is seeking more than $600 million in damages.

    The ruling is a big blow to Google, capping off a year of HR disasters. The company fired Dr. Timnit Gebru, and later Margaret Mitchell, calling into question academic integrity and its track record of how it treats Black women. The fallout has resulted in engineers quitting in protest and the company being removed as a sponsor for a prominent AI ethics conference.

  • Goldman Sachs Cleared in Apple Card Discrimination Investigation

    Goldman Sachs Cleared in Apple Card Discrimination Investigation

    New York’s Department of Financial Services has cleared Goldman Sachs, concluding it was not guilty of any violations in how it handled Apple Card applications.

    Goldman Sachs is the company backing the Apple Card, the first time the financial institution has offered a credit card. The Apple Card has been a popular offering by the Cupertino company, giving customers significant discounts and benefits.

    The investigation stemmed from accusations by a tech entrepreneur that Goldman Sachs’ algorithm discriminated based on gender. The entrepreneur had evidently received a credit limit 20 times larger than his wife. As a result, New York’s Department of Financial Services investigated to ensure Goldman Sachs was not in violation of anti-discrimination laws.

    According to Reuters, that investigation is now complete, and Goldman Sachs has been cleared. The investigation included interviews, a review of records and data for some 400,000 New York applicants.

  • Thinking About Using AI to Recruit New Staff? Amazon’s Failed Experiment Might Have You Thinking Twice

    Thinking About Using AI to Recruit New Staff? Amazon’s Failed Experiment Might Have You Thinking Twice

    Companies that are planning to use artificial intelligence for recruitment should think twice before doing that. A new report revealed that Amazon’s AI machine learned gender bias and weeded out women as potential job candidates. The machine even downgraded applicants based on the school they attended.

    A growing number of employers are using AI to boost the efficiency of their hiring process. The machine can be utilized to evaluate resumes, narrow down a list of applicants, and recommend candidates for the right post within a company. It can then pass on its findings to its live counterpart for human assessment. While AI is an effective tool for screening resumes, it has been shown to develop bias, as proven by Amazon’s experiment.

    Reuters reported that the retail giant spent several years developing an AI that would vet job applicants. The machine was trained to look at the resumes that the company received for the past ten years. But as most of these applications were from male applicants, the patterns the AI identified were strongly oriented to that sex. In short, Amazon’s AI learned gender bias.

    For instance, the AI developed a preference for terms like “captured” or “executed,” which were words commonly used by male engineers. The machine also began to penalize applications that included the word “women” or “women’s.” So describing yourself as the head of the “women’s physics club” was a strike against you.

    A source familiar with Amazon’s AI program also admitted that the machine even downgraded applicants who graduated from two all-women’s universities. The names of the universities were not specified in the report.

    The bias shown by the AI’s algorithm became noticeable a year after the project started, and Amazon admittedly tried to correct its AI. The company’s engineers initially edited the system to make it neutral to these specific words. However, there was no way of proving that the machine would not learn another way to sort candidates in a discriminatory manner.

    The project was eventually shelved in 2017 because company executives lost confidence in it. The AI also reportedly failed at providing choices for strong and effective job candidates.

    Fortunately for Amazon, the AI hiring experiment was just a trial run. The machine was never utilized by a larger group and was never used as the main recruiting agent. Nevertheless, the possibility is high that a qualified applicant was weeded out simply because she was a woman and did not think to use a masculine term like “capture.”

    [Featured image via Pexels]