GV (Google Ventures)
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2015–2018
1:02:51 · 393K views · Sep 25, 2014
A Google Ventures talk on how unconscious biases shape product decisions, hiring and workplace interactions. It draws on research, including work by Google scientists, on how to counter them.
HN recommends it as an interesting look at the psychology research behind bias in hiring and performance reviews.
3 comments from Hacker News
Maybe it'd be helpful to not discriminate against other genders and have other gender specific conferences too. Maybe we can divide the groups by race too. You know, so people are comfortable. Maybe I am too simple but I do no understand segregation. Neither do I understand "reverse" discrimination; for the lack of a better choice of words. Anytime you have something going on where if you reverse the "minority" with "majority" labels and the result sounds bad, I feel like the original was bad too. For down voters: Please feel free to leave a comment explaining your stands. Also, people who are interested in the ideas of removing bias, scientifically backed arguments exist. The touchy-feely-ride-the-trend ones are just more talked about. It's like picking the color of a bike shed. Here's an interesting talk titled Unconscious Bias @ Work | Google Ventures. this video
For the people who are interested in this topic, Google has a training video that talks through some interesting psychology research that ties to hiring / performance reviews - this video I haven't been able to locate many similar good talks, so if anyone can point me to speakers / talks I'd appreciate it.
You might also want to look into "Disparate Impact" [0] and "Unconscious Bias" [1]. > For example, if XYZ Company hired 50 percent of the men applying for work in a predominantly male occupation while hiring only 20 percent of the female applicants, one could look at the ratio of those two hiring rates to judge whether there might be a discrimination problem. The ratio of 20:50 means that the rate of hiring for female applicants is only 40 percent of the rate of hiring for male applicants. That is, 20 divided by 50 equals 0.40, which is equivalent to 40 percent. Clearly, 40 percent is well below the 80 percent that was arbitrarily set as an acceptable difference in hiring rates. Therefore, in this example, XYZ Company could have been called upon to prove that there was a legitimate reason for hiring men at a rate so much higher than the rate of hiring women. [0] [LINK] [1] this video