Comment by Oras | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Oras | Hacker News Reader

While I agree there should be regulations, there should be clear requirements instead of saying "bias". What does bias mean? To clarify, here are a few examples:

1. Gender bias

There is a widely used keyword-based gender bias measurement based on a study from 2011. The research claims that job ads with higher levels have more masculine words. This is based on a pre-defined list of masculine and feminine words [0][1]. Another Harvard study stated that women would only apply for jobs if they meet 100% of the requirements, while men would apply for 60% or less [2].

2. Racial bias

This might be more related to video interviews or based on name, age, or address in resumes. For resumes, there are tools already to anonymise resumes to ensure the focus is on experience instead of the person.

3. Disability

ADA (American Disability Act). According to this FAQ [3], "The ADA does not require employers to develop or maintain job descriptions. However, a written job description that is prepared before advertising or interviewing applicants for a job will be considered as evidence along with other relevant factors."

The list could go on, with age, sexual orientation, native speaker or not ... etc. That's why the expectations have to be clearly defined.

The law, as I understand it, will lock employers to their vendors as they will be required to keep data for auditing, which might incur more charges.

[0] https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/static/documents/Gauc...

[1] https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/about

[2] https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...

[3] https://adata.org/faq/does-ada-require-employers-develop-wri....

There are clear requirements that define bias. They’re in the Federal Equal Employment regulations. The bill cites them.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title42/html...

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-29/subtitle-B/chapter-XIV...

Can you quote the definition of bias from the links you provided?

I didn’t directly cite all relevant code that exists, there is more regulation cited by the links I gave you might need to follow. It’s easier to visit https://www.eeoc.gov/ and browse their “discrimination by type” pages under the “employees” and “employers” tabs. I’m not quite sure exactly what you’re getting at, but the EEOC doesn’t really use the word “bias” per se, they talk about discrimination on the basis of sex, age, disability, race, national origin, etc.

The NY law uses the word ‘bias’ pretty much only in the phrase “bias audit”, which is defined in the law to mean a yearly audit of the software to make sure it is not discriminating as far as EEOC standards.

The point is that there isn’t a new law about bias, and it’s not an ambiguous or undefined concept. It’s the existing equal employment opportunity laws, and all employers already know about them, and most (I hope) already adhere to them. I’m not suggesting it’s either complete or perfect, I’m just pointing out what the new NY law is referring to when it uses the words “bias audit”.

Just to add to this, I feel like there's a ton of ways to "accidentally" introduce a lot of bias in hiring: referring everyone from your college's club to the company, brain teasers that require some irrelevant cultural background, mandatory in office/remote cultures, off site decisions. Heck I even saw a company that advertised that they go surfing together every weekend for bonding.

I'm not sure what can be done with these cases, and I know people, of various protected out-groups, that have specifically mentioned those as reasons not to join a company.

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