[HN Gopher] Study shows class bias in hiring based on few second...
___________________________________________________________________
Study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech
Author : allthebest
Score : 64 points
Date : 2021-04-27 19:57 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.yale.edu)
| dominotw wrote:
| where is the link to the actual study? is it one of these
| https://som.yale.edu/publications/faculty/michael.kraus-at-y...
| giantg2 wrote:
| I enjoy driving my old box Chevy down the back end church road to
| go fish'n at the crick. It's also fun when the roads get slippy
| in the winter.
|
| Seriously, that's stuff I'd say.
| javier10e6 wrote:
| Newsbreak: A Univ of YALE study/research confirms that you'll
| have a better chance to get hired if you talk like a YALE
| professor at your job interview. Unless the job interview is
| working the cash register at Sonic's.
| legerdemain wrote:
| Today we learn that Aaron earned an iron urn.
| Aunche wrote:
| >The study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National
| Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that people can accurately
| assess a stranger's socioeconomic position -- defined by their
| income, education, and occupation status
|
| One takeaway here is that biases tend to be correct, which makes
| them that much harder to eliminate.
| hellisothers wrote:
| I'd love to hear these audio recordings and the research
| subject's responses. Curious what sounds triggered what bias.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| This makes sense given that there have already been studies that
| show that this is already practiced when people call to search
| for housing. https://source.wustl.edu/2006/02/linguistic-
| profiling-the-so...
|
| It's not that much of a stretch to say that if real estate agents
| or landlords do it, that hiring professionals also do it.
| vmception wrote:
| I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this
| comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the
| half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not
| access the economy or capital or literacy.
|
| Racial discrimination also occurs.
|
| A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too
| reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in
| the majority power who experience biases or don't inherit some of
| the privileges that they are assumed by others to have. A lot of
| racial discrimination is created and perpetuated by invalidating
| those potential allies' experience. While the class bias is never
| addressed at all.
| skyde wrote:
| Totally agree with you. Which explain why African immigrant
| that speak (proper) English and wear a suit and tie. Don't have
| trouble in job interview even if they are "black". While the
| Black American blame it on racism.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| as a white that grew up very very poor, I can't possibly
| understand why so many black people try to convince me that I'm
| guilty of white privilege, when most of them had many more
| resources growing up.
| sopp wrote:
| > accused of being guilty of white privilege
|
| Maybe "accused" and "guilty" are not the right framing here -
| you inherit white privilege because of your ethnicity, it
| doesnt necessarily make you guilty of anything, but you
| benefit from it whether you want it or not.
|
| You can think of it in the same way that the wealthier people
| you mention have inherited a better social class by just
| being born. They can profit from the privilege of their
| wealth, while suffering from racial discrimination. You can
| suffer from poverty, while not being hindered by your skin
| color. People are multi-dimensional.
|
| I think a fairer way to compare would be to compare people
| from the same social class when looking for privilege and
| inequality here. Is a poor white person doing better than a
| poor black person? Is a rich black person doing better than a
| poor black person? Is a white rich female doing better than a
| white rich male? Etc...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Sure you can. You're less likely to be pulled over in most of
| the US than a black person driving the same car and wearing
| the same clothes.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| I was stopped too by police and one time briefly searched,
| so what? Being stopped by the police is not a game changer.
| If you haven't done anything wrong you'll walk away and go
| to work and back home.
|
| Why is being stopped by police such a big deal? I think the
| police should do more of that in the US, it would reduce
| crime considerably.
| lucian1900 wrote:
| Black peoples in the US are far more likely to be
| summarily executed when interacting with police.
| metiscus wrote:
| Well, let's say that drug use is fairly evenly
| distributed regardless of race across a group of people.
| If black people get searched more frequently, even if
| every search is equally justified, then the number of
| black people being prosecuted for drug infractions would
| be disproportionate.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| There is an additional social and mental cost to being,
| essentially, a pariah in your own country. If you grew up
| poor and white, this country has probably treated you like
| shit, but at least it's clear that it's your country, ya
| know? For the most part, you never have to wonder if a group
| of people are going to show up at your door with torches and
| pitchforks.
|
| Feeling that type of insecurity, especially when it builds up
| over generations, takes a toll that's hard to describe. It
| gets labeled a privilege by people who lack that feeling, and
| see it as such.
| metiscus wrote:
| It isn't my argument, but as I try to understand all sides
| I'll do my best to explain the position anyway.
|
| The idea goes something like this. You have white privilege
| because you are visibly white. By being visibly white you
| gain an automatic differentiation from those who are non-
| white. The belief is that the system, being largely run by
| white people will extend courtesy and nicer treatment to
| those who look like it whilst those who differ in appearance
| must "earn" the position you are given by the elements of
| your birth. It's a bit more complicated than that but that's
| my understanding of the core of it.
|
| I am not trying to strawman the argument and if I have it
| wrong, please explain where I wandered off course.
| throawy-poor wrote:
| you will get some replies with the depth of "it would be
| worse if you were not white." I think there is only the
| smallest amount of truth there. Here are things that have
| happened to me, a poor white kid from california (and this is
| just off the top of my head):
|
| I could never join a sports team in school or other extra
| curricular, that shit's expensive.
|
| I had to steal food to get enough to eat.
|
| I've been pulled over multiple times, nearly every case
| because my car was shitty and the cop was shaking me down.
|
| I've been stopped by cops for walking through a hospital
| parking lot to go visit a friend.
|
| I've had a cop pull a gun out at me and order me to the
| ground. I was 14.
|
| I was told at a young age to follow cop orders exactly and be
| non threatening else I may get shot.
|
| My mom didn't come to a complete stop at a side street stop
| sign. Pulled over and the entire car tossed. The cop told my
| mom she likely stole it and they will find out what she did.
|
| A white buddy got the shit beat out of him by a cop. His
| crime was being poor and skating.
|
| I've seen a lot of nice cars going to a car race and then
| there was my buddy and I in a shitty car. We got pulled over
| and harassed.
|
| I was constantly excluded from most of my peer group because
| I was poor.
|
| I had to work multiple jobs to put myself through college --
| little financial aid there.
|
| I spent over a decade scraping by because I didn't have a
| single role model on how to grow my career (or even really
| start one). Living in a low socio-economic area makes it hard
| to earn enough to get out.
|
| I was the first and only person in my family to go to
| college.
|
| I've been ghosted on interviews, called racist names, and
| hell, my wife had rocks thrown at her as a kid because she
| was one of like 5 white kids at her inner city school.
|
| Classism is elephant in the room nobody seemingly will
| acknowledge. But, hey, I'm white, so it can't be that bad,
| right? /s
| fighterpilot wrote:
| 99 percent correlation is too high and contradicts the spirit
| of the statement that it's more class bias than race bias. If
| the correlation is 99 percent then they're nearly completely
| identical
| Thorentis wrote:
| Correlation doesn't mean causation. If the cause is class
| bias, and you spend all your energy trying to make people
| more tolerant of other races, when actually they have no
| racist feelings whatsoever but have terrible class
| prejudices, then all your efforts are in vain. Trying to
| conflate the two things just because a correlation might
| exist is the problem OP is talking about.
| vmception wrote:
| the point is how to address it and gain support from people
| that don't experience it but have the power to change it
|
| if we tell everyone they have problems with skin tones and
| phenotypes when really their primary unconscious bias is
| being pretentious, then we need to adjust the messaging and
| address it more accurately
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > class bias is never addressed at all
|
| You see this a lot in online forums, e.g. a person will
| blithely mock "wal-mart shoppers" or "rednecks" without rebuke
| and then jump down your throat with "white privilege" if they
| perceive the slightest possiblity of you questioning a racial
| bias claim.
| newacct583 wrote:
| Interestingly, I see some of the former in online forums. I
| see a decent amount of the latter, both with and without
| justification. I've never in my life seen a single poster do
| that. You have a cite demonstrating this happens "a lot"?
|
| This sounds like a strawman. You're taking a criticism often
| made (again, not without justification) against "your side"
| and arguing against it by charging the "other side" with
| hipocrisy despite the fact that e.g. the /r/FloridaMan
| community has almost no overlap with woke SJWs (or even the
| surburban families in my neighborhood with BLM signs in their
| yards).
| DenisM wrote:
| I must say it also look rather beneficial to some - while the
| lower classes are duking it out over a divisive issue the upper
| classes are safe from social reform. Divide and rule.
| heterodoxxed wrote:
| The two are so incredibly intertwined given our history that
| it's hard to separate them. While I think talking about race
| without talking about class is a huge mistake, it's also a
| mistake to think that class in a way that doesn't take race
| into consideration.
|
| For instance, AAVE is seen as "low class" despite there being
| plenty of speakers of it who are not lower class at all.
|
| The kind of racial reductionism we've seen come from (often
| well-to-do) liberal circles that presents being white (or not
| Black) no matter the class background as a walk in the park is
| a dead end of course, but we have to be careful to recognize
| that there are a number of structural racial problems that
| don't always have a targeted class character (unless you get to
| the very upper echelons of wealth).
|
| That said, the popular discourse in America is woefully under-
| prepared to understand class divisions between and within
| racial groups. That lack of nuanced discussion is why we end up
| favoring an understanding that is fully rooted in upper-middle-
| class experiences and study.
|
| A Black writer who grew up poor, went to a city college and
| still lives in their neighborhood will never get an op-ed
| position at the New York Times no matter how good of a writer
| they are, so their experience gets completely lost in the
| mainstream, despite being so important to understanding class
| and race in America.
| hnxs wrote:
| I think class is primarily dictated by three things on a
| superficial level, e.g ten minutes or less of a first
| interaction with someone:
|
| - How you speak
|
| - How you dress
|
| - How physically attractive you are, specifically in regards
| to things like height, fitness, and angular features.
|
| Skin color takes a backseat to these factors in the modern
| era
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I'd say it's more like 10 seconds, maybe even less than
| that, but I agree.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Yes, with the addendum of, "If any of these things place
| you into a minority community, you immediately lose."
|
| What is "good speech"? What is "good dress"? What is
| "attractive"? To much of society, those answers are,
| "Whatever sounds/looks like the popular culture I consume."
| and that's a problem.
| vmception wrote:
| Yes, and on your first point I think this will be a recurring
| addendum to my post. My point is that we must address the
| class issue between and within racial groups or simply put:
| American culture. It requires compartmentalizing and
| understanding this more heavily, instead of looking only at
| the result. We are chiseling at the top of an iceberg, trying
| to trace backwards and assuming people feel a way that many
| otherwise supportive people really don't feel, instead of
| tackling a root cause.
| twic wrote:
| > A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is
| too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential
| allies in the majority
|
| There was a study on that recently:
|
| https://osf.io/tdkf3/
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I've got a lot of problems with this work, but I think I can
| best summarize my issues with the question: Who are the
| "Democratic elites"? A list of "Democratic politicians" and
| quotes from them is given, but I'm curious if that's the full
| summation of who the "elites" are, or if there are other,
| thus far unnamed "elites".
|
| I can't think of a better example, but this reminds me of
| some of the papers on skull size from the late 19th/early
| 20th century (Mortonites? A bit fuzzy, it's been a minute).
| There was an undeniable correlation, but it took decades to
| undo the false causation that was _implied_ (not directly
| stated in that paper or this one), and that damage still has
| not been fully undone, despite the heroic lifelong work of
| Franz Boas and others.
|
| This paper needed to discuss _why_ racial framing isn 't
| persuasive, and it doesn't do that. The whole, "We should
| trick white people into being kinder to minorities" argument
| is, frankly, insulting to white people, among many other not-
| very-noble things. White people should be able to hear
| arguments about racial inequality without losing their
| collective minds.
| vmception wrote:
| released yesterday, wow
|
| nice to see the collective conscious is producing similar
| paths of study
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| There once was a study where they eloquently demonstrated this
| by putting the same white actor into two situations: one had
| him lay down acting like he was dying from a hear attack in
| front of Wall Street wearing a suit. The other had him doing
| the same thing but wearing worn out sports clothing.
|
| They found that people responded more favorably to the actor
| when he appeared to be of the same social class.
| hirundo wrote:
| Is class stereotype bias accurate? I don't know. But if so then
| the optimal amount of actual bias may be nonzero. So does the
| study show the right amount of bias, too, little, or too much?
|
| It wouldn't be easy to measure the correlation between classes
| and employee performance, but not impossible either. Lacking such
| data it's hard to know how to interpret such results.
|
| Of course any such bias, whatever it is, should be deeply
| discounted by any actual personal data you can gather in an
| interview. Any group-based bias should be considered trivial in
| comparison. But this study is explicitly about considering only
| class signals.
| Clubber wrote:
| It would be nice to get a transcript so we could identify what
| speech was declared to be lower socioeconomic speech.
|
| It's important to be able to speak and write proper English for a
| job interview, even though most speak in an informal English most
| of the time.
| bitwize wrote:
| This doesn't take into account things like accent, which does
| count. Many people native to the Boston area looking to get
| high-paying jobs (esp. in tech) work on breaking their Boston
| accents to sound higher class.
| devonkim wrote:
| This is probably also true in the UK that has class lines
| often built around geography and therefore accents. In the US
| people with southern accents are viewed by many others as
| having a lower socioeconomic status. Things get more
| interesting when the history of the modern Boston accent
| comes from popular British speech trends hundreds of years
| ago and co-opted by the aristocrats of Boston, so what is an
| oftentimes low-caste Boston accent today was meant to be a
| high-caste accent around 1800.
|
| The ridiculousness of it all is staggering
| intergalplan wrote:
| Practically _all_ US regional accents, especially if thick,
| register as "lower" than Standard American English spoken
| with a generic or newscaster accent.
| disabled wrote:
| There is no Standard US English accent. Even people from
| the US Pacific Northwest speak with an accent.
|
| Interestingly, there are AI apps to make your English
| accent [1] more mainstream, but the fact is that judging a
| person by their accent is xenophobic.
|
| Anyways, I practice my pronunciation for a foreign language
| using speech recognition software/apps.
|
| [1] Class Is in Session: AI App Schools on English
| Pronunciation:
| https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/06/26/class-is-in-
| session...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The national news anchors _de facto_ define the standard
| US accent.
| intergalplan wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English
|
| Also called "Standard American English" (as noted in the
| article). It's what you mostly hear on the radio, in film
| actors when they're acting but not "doing an accent",
| among professional newscasters, et c. It's not been
| static through time--ever watch early talkies or listen
| to '30s radio serials?--but it exists.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Erasing your regional accent probably goes a long way. I have a
| pretty strong Maine accent and it's hard to suppress.
|
| I don't think I could fake a true bourgeoisie affect though,
| partly because I find it so repulsive. But also I think you
| have to have had grown adults as your personal servants as I a
| child to really nail that sort of bored/unconcerned affect.
| Where you truly consider certain people to be beneath you. They
| see you as an NPC. I've seen it, a handful of times.
|
| I guess there's a professional class in between too where the
| attitude is in between, you treat people with a friendliness
| that doesn't seem superior, but also is guiltless and free of
| guile, lacking in any suspiciousness which speaks of a person
| who has never truly been hungry and not had food, or has
| considered breaking the law as their best option, or lived in
| an area where there was a lot of crime.
|
| I don't know why all that comes out in your speech but it does.
| Truly lower class people are reserved- they don't volunteer
| information, because they don't trust you. Upper class people
| don't either, because they don't have to care what you think,
| and they don't consider you an equal. In between, people tend
| to be more talkative.
| molsongolden wrote:
| Sending out an HN bat signal here:
|
| I can't find the article/post that this comment reminded me
| of but it was a semi-recent discussion/breakdown of class in
| the USA.
|
| All I remember is that it called out Jeff Bezos as upper
| middle class.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| The article specifies pretty clearly that the data used
| included, in part, things like voices from consumer speech
| recognition products. Furthermore, they found that speech
| patterns were associated with an actual higher social class.
| hn8788 wrote:
| Doesn't suprise me. My wife is from a rural town in NC, and was
| told by her high school teachers that she needed to lose her
| southern accent if she wanted to be taken seriously in college.
| When she was working on or master's degree in Maryland, a writing
| professor commented "you speak and write so well, I never would
| have guessed you're from the south". That kind of discrimination
| is very prevalent in academia and media in general, but nobody
| cares.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yes, but this illustrates that it's possible to make changes in
| how you present yourself to overcome potential class biases.
| This levels the playing field a lot. And why shouldn't people
| seeking higher status jobs or education be expected to present
| and conduct themselves accordingly?
| motoxpro wrote:
| "Don't speak like you, speak like me"
| intergalplan wrote:
| "Don't speak like you, or like me some years ago, speak how
| I learned to speak in order to signal that I'm both
| perceptive and capable, but also not so rich that I can
| wisely choose _not_ to signal those traits ".
| this_user wrote:
| This is pretty much the idea behind Received Pronounciation
| in BE.
| open0 wrote:
| "And why shouldn't people seeking higher status jobs or
| education be expected to present and conduct themselves
| accordingly?"
|
| Because accent has nothing to doing with "conducting oneself
| accordingly". Why is the onus on the victim of discrimination
| to align with your bogus, outdated way of thinking?
| hn8788 wrote:
| When my wife was working in the tutoring center during grad
| school, they were told that telling a minority student to
| write in "proper english" is racist. So there's clearly a
| double standard where you're advised that telling a black
| student to stop using slang and write in "proper english" is
| racist, but it's fine to tell a white southern student that
| if they had talked with an accent and used a southern
| vocabulary, that it's acceptable to assume they're stupid.
| Animats wrote:
| Where is Professor Higgins when we need him?
| Henry Higgins: Look at her, a prisoner of the
| gutter, Condemned by every syllable she utters By
| right she should be taken out and hung, For the cold-
| blooded murder of the English tongue. Eliza
| Doolittle: Aaoooww! Henry (imitating her): Aaoooww!
| Heavens! What a sound! This is what the British
| population, Calls an elementary education.
| Pickering: Oh Come sir, I think you picked a poor example.
| Henry: Did I? Hear them down in Soho Square,
| Dropping "h's" everywhere. Speaking English anyway they
| like. You sir, did you go to school? Man:
| Wadaya tike me for, a fool? Henry: No one taught him
| 'take' instead of 'tike! Hear a Yorkshireman, or worse,
| hear a Cornishman converse. I'd rather hear a choir
| singing flat. Chickens, cackling in a barn, just like
| this one (pointing to Eliza) Eliza: Gaaarn
| Henry (writing, imitating Eliza): Gaaarn.. I ask you
| Sir, what sort of word is that? (to Pickering) It's
| "aoow" and "gaarn" that keep her in her place Not her
| wretched clothes and dirty face Why can't the English
| teach their children how to speak? This verbal class
| distinction, by now, Should be antique. If you spoke as
| she does, sir, Instead of the way you do, Why,
| you might be selling flowers, too! Henry: An
| Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,
| The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman
| despise him. One common language I'm afraid we'll never
| get. Oh, why can't the English learn to set a
| good example to people whose English is painful to your
| ears? The Scotch and the Irish leave you close to tears.
| There even are places where English completely disappears.
| Well, in America, they haven't used it for years! Why
| can't the English teach their children how to speak?
| Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks have taught their Greek.
| In France every Frenchman knows his language from "A" to "Zed"
| The French never care what they do, actually, as long as
| they pronounce it properly. Arabians learn Arabian with
| the speed of summer lightning. And Hebrews learn it
| backwards, which is absolutely frightening. Use
| proper English you're regarded as a freak. Why can't the
| English, Why can't the English learn to speak?
| christophilus wrote:
| Such a great play / movie. I sometimes sing Hymn to Him just to
| get a nasty look out of my wife.
| gojomo wrote:
| Or, in movie-musical form:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Was just going to post about My Fair Lady. Just recently on
| Netflix and very striking to watch it vis a vis the culture
| conflict we're in yet again.
|
| I take the lesson of the film to be that high culture can be
| truly graceful and enriching (ie for Eliza) but can become a
| hangup when take as its own end (thus Higgins' faults)
| jpxw wrote:
| > the hiring managers judged the candidates from higher social
| classes as more likely to be competent for the job, and a better
| fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes.
|
| What if applicants from higher social classes actually are better
| fits for the job?
| kthartic wrote:
| What if they're not?
| indymike wrote:
| > What if applicants from higher social classes actually are
| better fits for the job?
|
| What a perfect example of social class bias. Change "from
| higher social class" to "from purple descent" or "from a
| Pastafarian background" and you have racial or religious bias.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| " The researchers based their findings on five separate studies.
| The first four examined the extent that people accurately
| perceive social class based on a few seconds of speech. They
| found that reciting seven random words is sufficient to allow
| people to discern the speaker's social class with above-chance
| accuracy. They discovered that speech adhering to subjective
| standards for English as well as digital standards -- i.e. the
| voices used in tech products like the Amazon Alexa or Google
| Assistant -- is associated with both actual and perceived higher
| social class. The researchers also showed that pronunciation cues
| in an individual's speech communicate their social status more
| accurately than the content of their speech."
|
| From the article.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Key bit here:
|
| > Devoid of any information about the candidates' actual
| qualifications, the hiring managers judged the candidates from
| higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job,
| and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social
| classes. Moreover, they assigned the applicants from higher
| social classes more lucrative salaries and signing bonuses than
| the candidates with lower social status.
|
| So while I don't fault the study here, it's not clear that this
| really demonstrates what the title says ("shows bias in hiring").
| It shows bias if you tell a hiring manager they need to make a
| hiring decision _based on no actual interviewing_. It 'd be like
| if a candidate came in for an interview, made 60 seconds of small
| talk, and then the hiring manager had to immediately make an
| offer. And, yeah, I'm not surprised that in a situation like
| that, hiring managers make decisions based on the slimmest of
| signals, amplifying class-based biases. Would they have way less
| bias if given any real signal about a candidate's fitness for a
| job? That's not shown one way or another according to this press
| release.
|
| That said, I generally _do_ believe the thesis here (that speech
| patterns influence class perceptions which significantly bias
| hiring), even if I 'm not convinced that this particular study
| shows that.
| beaner wrote:
| Yeah, the point taken from the study is really designed to
| stoke tension when it is not really reflective of anything
| meaningful when it comes to job applicant filtering.
|
| It reminds me of a learning from one of Thomas Sowell's books.
| There were communities that thought that background checks for
| employees in certain industries were racially discriminating by
| their very nature. They moved to ban them. Race disparities in
| those industries consequently went up, not down. The reason?
| Without an impartial and indifferent scan of a person's
| background, employer's were left to use the signals they could
| pick up on in person, filtered through their own biases. The
| solution was to allow background checks again.
|
| It sounds like this study is basically saying that without the
| background check (in this case, actual interviews assessing
| qualifications), that people are more likely to filter through
| whatever biases they have at their disposal. Sounds like no
| surprise... That's the whole point of the interview, to be the
| impartial and indifferent filter that anyone would be judged
| by. The solution is to just apply the interview and not judge
| based on a few seconds of dialogue. Which nobody does anyway.
| So it's not testing for anything real.
|
| (Cue many knee-jerk anecdotal counterpoints to "nobody does
| that anyway." Please. You're not getting that software
| engineering job by being an artist with no prior experience who
| flashes high-class speech for 10 seconds.)
| strogonoff wrote:
| > Please. You're not getting that software engineering job by
| being an artist with no prior experience who flashes high-
| class speech for 10 seconds.
|
| If that's all that distinguishes you from other applicants,
| you just might.
| howeyc wrote:
| I've always wondered with things like this, could it be possible
| to make all interaction "text-based" until final stage?
|
| Specifically for hiring:
|
| What if applicants submitted resumes, but the name and school
| they attended are replaced with numbers. Then throughout the
| interview process all interactions were text-based and they were
| addressed by this number. Then offer/acceptance is based on merit
| (hopefully) and not on economic status, race, gender, etc.
|
| I admit this isn't exactly well thought out, just a thought I've
| had as a possible way to hopefully weed out any areas for bias to
| creep into the process.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I have wished for a system like this forever.
|
| I have no qualms over a test. We all need to take tests.
|
| Give all applicants a few written tests on the job they are
| hiring for.
|
| The people who do well on the test are given the job on a
| probationary basis.
|
| I might even exclude references, and schooling?
| rsa25519 wrote:
| > The people who do well on the test are given the job on a
| probationary basis.
|
| This sounds terrible. Not everyone can take tests well (even
| if they strongly understand the content), and few people can
| afford to accept a job that's probationary.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I've met plenty of average people / mediocre performers
| that probably test worse than their other performance, but
| I've never met an exceptional performer that was a poor
| tester. I have met some exceptional testers that were poor
| performers due to personality issues.
|
| Tests have issues, but in general, the statement: "if
| you're a "bad tester" you're not an excellent performer" is
| pretty true.
|
| The caveat being that, IMO, most of the time, institutions
| are using the wrong test.
| njarboe wrote:
| In the US at least, at-will employment means that all jobs
| are "probationary".
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Because (admittedly an extreme example) if I'm hiring for a
| public-facing position, I don't want to get someone with pink
| and blue hair, excessive piercings and poor hygiene even if
| they're smart and capable of performing the job function
| otherwise.
|
| In at least some cases, presenting and conducting yourself as a
| "normal" person is important.
| hpoe wrote:
| Sounds like applying for a loan right now. The person at the
| bank puts a few numbers into a computer that ties to a big
| database maintained by
| Experian/TransUnion/Equifax/ProfessionalParasites, and then it
| decides if I should get a loan or not.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Look up redlining to see how banks accomplish this even when
| they're legally supposed to be blind.
| noahtallen wrote:
| Interestingly, Automattic (where I work) is completely text-
| based throughout the entire hiring process for many roles. The
| first interview is via Slack, the code test and trial stages
| are via pull requests, slack, and p2. It's great because day-
| to-day work uses these async tools rather than calls. So it's
| more accurate anyways.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| I like that but race and gender blind admissions will lead to a
| huge number of East Asian males which won't be tolerated.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Why would it lead to a huge number of East Asian males?
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Universities use an unblinded selection process as a way to
| intentionally handicap East Asians (and to a slightly
| lesser extent, white people). Their proportion in enrolment
| has been trending down steadily over time and has converged
| to be nearly identical across all the top universities
| (except for Caltech) which suggests they're all silently
| colluding (by copying each others' quotas) to keep the
| Asian enrolment percentage at precisely the depressed X
| percent.
|
| Private companies don't have such explicit Asian quotas in
| place but the spirit of affirmative action is to handicap
| Asian men and white men in the interview process. Google
| does this by making the interview process easier for non
| majority groups. If you can't apply the handicap then it
| follows that the majority groups proportions will increase.
|
| Of course, the counter argument is that implicit bias and
| so on will mean the opposite will occur. But empirically
| that isn't what has happened in universities, and so I have
| no reason to expect it to happen in private hiring either.
| tylerhou wrote:
| > suggests they're all silently colluding (by copying
| each others' quotas) to keep the Asian enrolment
| percentage at precisely the depressed X percent.
|
| You need more evidence than a trend to claim that there
| is a conspiracy. And you can look the data & admissions
| guidelines publicly released in SFFA v. Harvard to see
| that there is no evidence that quotas exist.
|
| > Google does this by making the interview process easier
| for non majority groups.
|
| Uh, but it doesn't. Speaking as someone who has
| interviewed 30+ candidates at Google and been present at
| hiring committees, there is no "lowering of the bar" for
| people of certain races.
| cauliflower2718 wrote:
| I wonder if there are socioeconomic indicators in writing
| style, too. I wouldn't be surprised if there were, even if we
| consider only text in which grammar and spelling are correct.
| (As a small example, there are ways to sound more or less like
| a mathematician, even when writing about topics unrelated to
| math.)
| intergalplan wrote:
| Of course there are. They're easier to pick out in informal
| writing, of course, but even, "is capable of writing
| extensively in SWE without screwing up or revealing lower-
| class status through choice of word or idiom" is a pretty
| strong class marker. One can even infer gender with much
| better-than-even odds, though, again, it's easier the less-
| formal the writing. There exist computer programs that
| attempt that trick with fair success, too, though humans are
| plenty capable of it on their own.
|
| As for your example of mathematicians, and to offer a sense
| of how easy it can be to accidentally and innocently give
| these things away, something as simple as preposition use can
| give away a mathematician (or at least someone who's had some
| exposure to mathematical writing and usage). Consider:
| "over", and "in", for example, and also seemingly-innocent
| usage like the transitive verb "having", in a revealing
| context.
|
| See the commas after the closing quotation marks, in that
| second paragraph? If I'm American, and not obviously-
| deficient in the rest of my writing, that's a fairly reliable
| signal that I'm a programmer.
| Mvandenbergh wrote:
| The more formal education someone has, the less their writing
| will reflect these origins. Spoken language has both an
| accent and a sociolect (dialect associated with a social
| class). I don't think there's a writing equivalent of accent
| that is associated with a social class.
|
| Consider that people will do all of their writing in an
| educational or formal context. I.e. nobody grows up writing
| to their parents, siblings, and neighbourhood kids in a
| particular sociolect the way they do with speaking. Many
| people who speak with not just the accent but also the
| sociolect of a particular class group will nonetheless write
| in a way that only really reflects their education since that
| is the context where they have done most of their writing.
|
| There are definitely stylistic tics that reflect certain ways
| of thinking. Someone who describes an idea as a "first order
| approximation" which is "correct to an order of magnitude"
| reveals that they have come from a particular way of thinking
| about the world. I'm not sure how may social class related
| style "tells" would make it into someone's written
| communication though. Especially task-related communication
| during a hiring process. Unlike accent which is always on,
| particular sociolect may only be deployed in a particular
| context.
|
| It is often pretty easy to tell writing, even if
| grammatically correct, which comes from someone who is not
| highly educated and doesn't used writing as a main method of
| communication. They tend to ramble and their writing reads
| like a transcript. I used to follow the legal advice
| subreddits and often the people with the most complex and
| troubling problems would describe them in this wildly
| digressive way where right in the middle of a paragraph about
| something that X had done to Y we're suddenly treated to
| completely irrelevant details about Y's sister of X's uncle.
|
| Again though, this only shows up in the writing of someone
| who hasn't had a lot of education. Someone from a humble
| background but a lot of practice writing may have an obvious
| accent while writing like any other educated professional.
| Unlike accents which are almost indelible.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| If we did decide to do hiring this way, you could be sure
| that there _would be_ , even if there aren't any currently.
|
| People would try choosing their words to make them sound like
| they're part of the "in" group.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-27 23:01 UTC)