Skip to main content
state library of queensland
Blog
Business and entrepreneurs

Unconscious bias: Amazon forced to scrap machine learning recruitment tool because it didn’t like women

By Administrator | 12 October 2018

E-commerce giant Amazon reportedly had to scrap a machine-learning recruitment tool because it was biased against female candidates.

According to a report from Reuters, Amazon started building the platform in 2014, to help speed up the recruitment process by making it automated and more efficient. It rated resumes out of five, automatically ranking candidates in terms of suitability.

However, by 2015, the company realised the tool was consistently ranking resumes that featured the word ‘women’ poorly, compared to those that didn’t.

Any resume that mentioned involvement in women’s clubs or sports teams, for example, were downgraded. According to Reuters, it also downgraded graduates of two women’s colleges.

Any artificial intelligence or machine learning technology is only as smart as the information it’s learning from. Amazon’s tool was designed to analyse hiring patternsover a ten-year period — a period when the vast majority of hires, especially engineers and data scientists, were male.

This trend led to the tool ‘learning’ that Amazon did not want to hire female applicants.

According to Reuters, Amazon recruiters never relied on the tool entirely and stopped using it once the issue was raised. Now, the tech giant only uses a very watered down version of the tool, and only for administrative tasks. Read more

Stephanie Palmer-Derrien - SmartCompany - 11 October 2018

Comments

Your email address will not be published.

We welcome relevant, respectful comments.

Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
We also welcome direct feedback via Contact Us.
You may also want to ask our librarians.