After being ghosted by numerous recruiters during her unemployment, Aliyah Jones, a Black woman, decided to create a LinkedIn ‘catfish’ account under the name Emily Osborne, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white woman eager to advance her career in graphic design. The only difference between ‘Emily’ and Jones? Their names and skin colour. Their work experience and capabilities were the same.
Jones decided to proceed with applying for jobs using both her own and the catfish account. Her findings are raising urgent questions about discrimination in AI-driven recruiting. ‘Emily’ received interview invitations 57.9% of the time, compared to Jones’s 8.9%. This double standard is not new. One study showed AI tools used in the recruitment process favour ‘white sounding’ names 85% of the time and disadvantage Black males 100% of the time. Infuriatingly so, the blatant racism goes above and beyond this time, Jones states that recruiters also ghosted her after automated video-screening tools flagged her tone or facial expressions as “too informal”. AlgorithmWatch warned about these types of automated voice discrimination already in 2019.
A collective of white women changed their LinkedIn gender to male last month and found the engagement to their profiles to have significantly increased. Marginalised and racialised people should obviously not have to fake their identity to ‘play’ the automated systems. We know that if recruiting platforms do not actively address these types of discrimination, they dangerously risk perpetuating the systems of oppression we work so hard to dismantle.
Jones is a true hero: “I’m just fighting for everyone else that’s scared to use their voice in these spaces,” and her experience underlines the dire need for radical new ways of thinking about these types of tech.
See: LinkedIn Catfish” Aliyah Jones Created a Fake Profile to Expose Racial Inequity in Hiring at Teen Vogue, and I Became A ‘Corporate Catfish’ & Proved Job Discrimination Is Real at Unbothered.
Image courtesy of Aliyah Jones, composite by Liz Coulbourne, via the original article.