As companies increasingly regarding AI in their hiring process, advocates, lawyers, and researchers have continued to sound the alarm. Algorithms have be found to automatically assign different scores to job candidates based on arbitrary criteria such as whether they have wear glasses or a headscarf Or there’s a bookshelf in the back. Hiring algorithms can penalize applicants for having Black sound namerefer to a women’s universityand even submit their resume using file type. They can be detrimental to people who stutter or have physical disabilities that limit their ability to interact with the keyboard.
All of this has not been widely controlled. But now, the US Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have released guidance about what businesses and government agencies must do to ensure their use of AI in hiring complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“We cannot let these tools become a high-tech avenue for discrimination,” said EEOC President Charlotte Burrows. The EEOC instructs employers to disclose to applicants not only when algorithmic tools are being used to evaluate them, but also the characteristics those algorithms evaluate.
“Today we are sounding the alarm about the dangers associated with blind reliance on AI and other technologies that we are seeing increasingly used by employers,” said the assistant. Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clark told reporters at the same press conference. “Today, we are making it clear that we must do more to remove the barriers that people with disabilities face, and there is no doubt: The use of AI is increasing discrimination against people with disabilities. age-old treatment that job seekers with disabilities face.”
The Federal Trade Commission has released extensive guidance on how businesses can use algorithms in 2020 And one more time in 2021and a White House agency is studying AI’s Declaration of Human Rights, but this new guidance signals how the two agencies will handle violations of federal civil rights law related to the use of algorithms. It also presents a credible threat of enforcement: The Department of Justice can sue businesses and the EEOC receives complaints of discrimination from job seekers and employees that can lead to money. fines or lawsuits.
According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, people with disabilities are unemployed at twice the national average. People with mental health-related disabilities also experience high levels of unemployment, and Burrows says employers must take steps to screen the software they use to make sure they’re not locked out. people with disabilities out of the job market.
Several actions confirmed by the EEOC and DOJ earlier Thursday were proposed in the Center for Technology and Democracy 2020 report about ways in which software leasing may discriminate against people with disabilities. These include eliminating automatic screening for people with disabilities and providing “reasonable accommodation” for those who may have difficulty using software or hardware involved in the recruitment process. The CDT report also urges testing of recruitment algorithms before and after they are put into use — a step not covered by the EEOC — and mentions a bias toward the online recruitment of people with disabilities. line as an “invisible injustice”.
As a teenager, Lydia XZ Brown thought filling out personality tests on job applications seemed like a fun or quirky game. They couldn’t prove it, but now they suspect they faced discrimination when applying for jobs at the mall near where they grew up in Massachusetts. Co-author of the 2020 CDT recruitment discrimination report, Brown called Thursday’s guidance a big win, after years of campaigning, for people with disabilities like them.
