BiasMedium
Amazon's Experimental Hiring Tool Allegedly Displayed Gender Bias in Candidate Rankings
- Occurred
- Aug 10, 2016
- Published
- Oct 10, 2018
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Between 2014 and 2017, Amazon reportedly developed an AI-powered recruiting tool to score job applicants, trained on a decade of resumes purportedly drawn largely from men. Media reports say the system learned to favor male candidates, penalizing terms like "women's" and graduates from certain all-women's colleges. Efforts to remove these biases reportedly did not guarantee fairness, and the project was ultimately abandoned. Amazon reportedly states recruiters never solely relied on the tool.
Developers
- Amazon
Deployers
- Amazon
Harmed parties
- Women applying to Amazon
- Women and girls
- Women
- Amazon applicants
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: AI hiring tool exhibited gender discrimination against female candidates due to biased training data.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8