This week we read chapter 6 of Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction. In this chapter she talks about the ways that WMD’s can red-light people with certain conditions into it being significantly harder or impossible to find work.
The chapter talks about a college student, Kyle Behm, a college student who suffered form bipolar disorder. After rehabilitating and getting better, Kyle tried applying for numerous minimum wage jobs only to get rejected, screened out because of his struggle with mental health. O’Neil talks about how questions like these concerning mental health among other things seem to screen out individuals from finding employment. It talks about the bad feedback loop that many companies use to screen out applicants, and how this bad data is just fed back into the test in a loop that just leads to more unfairness.
I think the problem in this is that it relies on untested assumptions, such as a person with a history of mental illness will not be as competent of a worker as someone who never has. I think assumptions like these should be tested and verified, altering these tests as needed. The problem is that an employee being successful can be subjective and there are even varying levels of “success”. One solution provided was to do blind interviews, where only the quality of their work is shown and not any personal information, which I think might be a good idea.
I have mixed feelings about this chapter. One one hand, it makes a certain bit of sense to not hire someone who does not fit the criteria for what is traditionally deemed a promising candidate. But I feel assumptions like this on such wide a scale, when humans are so unique, is generalizing people in a bad way and causing alot more harm than good, all to maintain a status quo.