AI Biases in Hiring

Female Applicant

Here is an example resume from a female applicant. Try hovering over phrases to see which ones might affect the AI's judgement!

Mekhi Branch1

Education

Barnard College2

Experience

Product Manager - Company 1
2022-2025

Software Engineer - Company 2
2018-20213

Activities

Captain - Women's Chess Club5

Volunteer - Food Bank

Hobbies

Softball6, Running, Photography

1Names associated with black people and communities are disadvantaged in both real life and simulated resume filtering trials (Yin et al., 2024)

2Reports state that Amazon's AI-powered hiring system disadvantaged graduates of all-women's colleges (Weissmann, 2018).

3ATS systems often devalued resumes with employment gaps, affecting women who have career interruptions due to caregiving responsibilities or maternity leave, even though these gaps do not affect their ability to perform the job (Goodman, 2018).

4Just stating the ability to write code, something quite important for a software developer, isn't favored against candidates that use more "macho" words (Weissmann, 2018).

5Resumes that even include the word "women" are also disadvantaged by Amazon's automated filtering system and other similar systems (Weissmann, 2018).

6Hobbies that are associated with men can be preferred by automated ATS tools when compared to hobbies associated with women (Lytton, 2024)

Look at the male applicant instead? Why is this?