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Amazon scraps 鈥榓nti-women鈥 AI recruiting engine
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Amazon鈥檚 machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women, several people familiar with the project say.
The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants鈥 resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent.
Automation has been key to Amazon鈥檚 e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions.
The company鈥檚 experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars 鈥 much like shoppers rate products on Amazon.
鈥淓veryone wanted this holy grail,鈥 one person familiar with the project said. 鈥淭hey literally wanted it to be an engine where I鈥檓 going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we鈥檒l hire those.鈥
But by 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way.
That is because Amazon鈥檚 computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.
In effect, Amazon鈥檚 system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word 鈥渨omen鈥檚,鈥 as in 鈥渨omen鈥檚 chess club captain.鈥
And it downgraded graduates of two all-women鈥檚 colleges, according to people familiar with the matter.
They did not specify the names of the schools.
Amazon edited the programs to make them neutral to these particular terms.
But that was no guarantee that the machines would not devise other ways of sorting candidates that could prove discriminatory.
The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project.
Amazon鈥檚 recruiters looked at the recommendations generated by the tool when searching for new hires, but never relied solely on those rankings, said several people familiar with the operation.
Amazon declined to comment on the recruiting engine or its challenges.
But the company says it is committed to workplace diversity and equality.
The company鈥檚 experiment offers a case study in the limitations of machine learning.
It also serves as a lesson to the growing list of large companies including Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc that are looking to automate portions of the hiring process.
Some 55 percent of US human resources managers said artificial intelligence, or AI, would be a regular part of their work within the next five years, according to a 2017 survey by talent software firm CareerBuilder.
Employers have long dreamed of harnessing technology to widen the hiring net and reduce reliance on subjective opinions of human recruiters. But computer scientists such as Nihar Shah, who teaches machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, say there is still much work to do.
鈥淗ow to ensure that the algorithm is fair, how to make sure the algorithm is really interpretable and explainable 鈥 that鈥檚 still quite far off,鈥 he said.
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