Simon Zerafa
Tinker ☀️RE: https://mstdn.social/@amydiehl/116343709194773175
AI is Bias at Scale.
AI is making a product of "We've always done it this way."
Helga
Arianne B
b4ux1t3 
#1️⃣@tinker I actually tried an… “experiment” last year.
I sent two copies of my resume in for a bunch of jobs. Lots of different jobs, but a new account for each resume for all ten. Marked myself as male for the demographics for the male resume, “prefer not to answer” for the femme version.
One had my name and my dates and so on so forth. Full first name to signal “male”.
Other had shortened first name (is genderless, if more commonly male). No dates. Same “things” there, but just less info that made me seem “male”. Less detail about some of the work I’ve done, more high-level. Literally, I applied my (admittedly dated) linguistics skills to it, to the point that I asked my dad to review “a resume” for me and he said “wow this chick sounds a lot like you”.
Male-coded resume got a callback from every job.
Femme-coded? One call out of ten applications.
And it was not a bad resume, it read to my dad as “pretty much exactly you, wow, you guys should hire her”.
I only interviewed with the one who responded to the femme-coded resume. I did not, unfortunately, get the job, though I _did_ get a short “oh I thought you were a chick” look from the hiring manager when we zoomed, which I will forever be proud of.
Edited to wrap “experiment” in scare quotes to make it more clear that I am not a professional jobologist surveying the mating habits of the great North American job-beast.
M.S. Bellows, Jr.@msbellows @tinker just to give no indication of age at all. You could piece together that the person is in their 30s, probably, but by my estimation the range is from like 29 to 41.
This was during a time that I wasn’t _actively_ looking for a job, just kind of testing the waters. Goal wasn’t to get hired but to see how bad the market is for me, in specific, and “hey why don’t I run a run experiment”.
It was more depressing than fun.
kit
Bitan Nath@bitanath @tinker I didn’t schedule an interview, at all. I didn’t “not show up”, I chose not to pursue those avenues.
Let’s do it the long way, then:
My company is in an AI death spiral. It has been for about a year and a half now. At the time, I didn’t actually know that, but was uneasy about some of the choices the company was making. So, as you _should be doing_ before undertaking any major life change, I started gathering information.
The way I usually do that is to start applying, a select few different roles that lets me get a taste for what the market looks like for me, specifically, at that specific time. This comes from a time before companies actually posted things like salary ranges.
This specific time, I was curious how different it would be if I took extra lengths to hide my gender and age. I don’t generally put personally-identifying info into job apps; “prefer not to answer”. But, it’s pretty obvious how old I am and what my gender is from my resume.
So I revised my resume in more strictly “neutral” patterns (I wanted to be a linguist when I was younger, even tried going to school for it, when I say that I’m _purely_ speaking about psychology, perception, and biases, not personal beliefs).
It was literally “I’m curious how different it is”. I am not some expert in analyzing the results of vanishingly-small-sample-size pseudo experiments, so I had no desire to try to communicate the results in any meaningful way. It’s come up in conversation a couple times, but there’s no reason for me to be self-publishing dubious research when the internet is already full of that sort of shit.
I get that it was my mistake to not assume every single person in tinker’s web of influence might would be okay with…I dunno, stolen LGBTQIA+ valor or something, but like I really didn’t think this would require a dissertation.
@bitanath (sorry tinker, dropping you now) what is making you say I was shortlisted?
The only replies I got were on my obviously-masculine resume, with the exception of the one interview for the non-masc one.
I attended the single interview that the non-masc resume got. They informed me that I wouldn’t be moving forward with the role a week later. I did not move forward with any of the other companies, and they are not sitting around holding up resources managing that application; they’re marking my file as “not interested” and moving on to one of the thousands of other applicants they have to go through this week.
What, specifically, did I do to deserve your ire here? Which of those events is the thing where I apparently hurt someone? Even if I had gotten an offer for that job, and I took it, that means that I was hired based on the merit of my application, and not based on being shortlisted. Having gotten that position would mean I’d be working at a company which at the very least took a chance in an apparently bad resume (because it’s possible that my tweaking just made it a bad resume, I don’t know why I need to point that out) and at best took a chance on a non-obviously-white-male applicant.
In that situation, you could say that I “took” a job from another applicant, but that’s still presuming there was exactly one position that applicants were applying to there. This is often not the case, especially if you’re a disenfranchised minority applying for anything that looks remotely like an opportunity.
We can sit here and debate the hiring climate, companies’ practices and malpractices, whatever, I’m with you, but I’m still trying to figure out what the hell I, in particular, did here.
Mark@MarkBrigham @tinker oh not at all, was just “the look”. Dunno how to describe it, confusion mixed with mild disappointment?
@MarkBrigham @tinker I will say that my use of the word “chick” here has entirely been my in-person coding bleeding into online. I didn’t grow up with it as any sort of pejorative or infantilism. Obviously that’s where it came from, but it was very common among my femme friends to call each other and women they talked to me about “chicks”.
I do recognize that in many places this is not the case, and I generally code switch a little better.
Mark 🇨🇦💪@mark yeah, while I’m applying for jobs I generally just put “prefer not to say” in every applicable section. I’m not a big believer in needing to game a system to get employed (as in, I do not need any more advantages than I am already presented).
The only jobs I’ve ever worked I was hired based on word of mouth and networking, I have never been able to land a job from a cold application except for my very first junior position forever ago.
(This isn’t a brag, this is the most fortunate set of circumstances I have ever experienced and I am constantly terrified of when my luck runs out)
Bird Wainer@tinker AI stands for Assumption Intensifier.