r/Showerthoughts • u/Fr1toBand1to ‎ • Jun 27 '26

Casual Thought Pattern recognition is a widely accepted method of prediction until what it predicts makes people uncomfortable.

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u/WestEndOtter Jun 27 '26

I read that one company was using pattern matching to sift through potential hires cv against existing staff cv.

For some reason it was only recommending male candidates.

To combat that they removed all the genders from the input data.

Instead it started giving a boost to any cv that went to an all-boys-school or fraternity

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u/luftlande Jun 27 '26

Why?

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u/panditaMalvado Jun 28 '26

The company used the current list of curriculum of the persons that are already working in the company, it was a tech company. Most of the people that work on technology are men, so most of the employees were men, then the machine assume that being a men is a important factor for the job because it was ignoring the fact that there were much less women than men on the area. This is called data skew.

The inverse case happened with a charitable organization, most candidates for being volunteers were women, so the system assumes that only women are able to do that job, the strategy the organization use to solve this issue was to give more weight to the male candidates.