Long ago, I was on the advertising board of a major restaurant chain. We had a meeting with out advertising agency where they were trying to push some statistics to us about when and where to place some TV ads. Some of us were skeptical and we asked to be given a presentation by the lady who came up with the figures.
Before we met her, one of the board members said, "I was told that it always works out that if this person is frumpy and wearing glasses then we should believe her."
She was frumpy. Wore glasses. And 100% correct on her TV time buying recommendations.
Ages ago when I got my first pair of glasses, already working as a sysadmin/system engineer with long hair and a unix beard... my friend and colleague said on my first day @ work in glasses, something to the effect of:
"it's amazing how by just adding glasses you went from stoner to professor"
Maybe? My personal observation is that female engineers who prefer dark clothing and wear glasses are often the best engineers. Is that sexist or is that using a different measure vs. beards for men?
I'm fully aware that these metrics are easily broken. Best eng I ever met dressed and talked like a complete hillbilly. Best female eng I ever met looked homeless, and indeed, did a lot of crack at one point.
Maybe you just perceive women that wear dark clothing to be better engineers because either you perceive them as less feminine, or because you are less distracted by their anatomical features (when they wear dark clothing).
Maybe? Dark clothing is generally something I find attractive, and unless exceptionally baggy, I can get a pretty decent idea of body type. I think it's the more utilitarian "vibe". If you're not thinking about matching colors, you probably have a more utilitarian mindset.
This applies to male engineers too, except there's other more important signals there.
I don't know that it's sexist per se, but if you use it to predict the outcome of future interactions (which I am assuming you do since you actually posted it here), then that is an example of bias. IANAL but probably actionable in the US.
So if your remark is, "In my limited experience I've worked with only 10 female engineers and the eight good ones all wore dark clothing and wear glasses. That's a funny and unlikely distribution!" then you're good.
If your remark is "I can determine if a female engineer is any good based on whether or not she is wearing dark clothing and glasses" then you probably have no business working in the field at all.
Which parts? The "men and women communicate differently" part or the "women are neurotic" part?
And if the former, do you take it as far as "Better not hire women, because it's all guys here, and we don't want to have to learn how to communicate with them?"
Women and men are different and communicate differently, tech is usually a male-calibrated environment, to get more women, you need to adjust the environment.
"Women are neurotic" is talking about the neuroticism trait. Women also score higher on average on agreeableness, for example. That's hard data, spoken in unflattering terms.
The former just means you need communication standards that are balanced.
I would never. I'm either genuinely interacting (with people) or genuinely shitposting in good faith (not sure what else to call it, I'm not necessarily going to stand behind everything I say, but the interaction is genuine). I assume many others here do the same.
It's funny, because i really really distrust that super slick fully suited salesman getup. I'm much more likely to be suckered in by a surfer dude in beach wear.
I've come to the conclusion affinity fraud is a very wide spectrum. You got guys like Madoff on one end. And people carefully picking out clothes and watching their accent on the other. I think of the latter as low grade affinity fraud.
An example a friend. Branches of her family are very wealthy almost old money. She could take something out of her closet and go to a party thrown by old money, fit right in and no one would suspect she's broke.
For better or worse it’s all part of human social networks. The looks, the lingo, etc all add up to help identify in-group vs out-group.
Don’t get me wrong, when I was younger it annoyed me much more. However now I accept that at some level it’s just part of the “human social dance”. Given that large societies, governments, corporations, etc all exist and can function shows that there’s something to it. Who knows, perhaps Neanderthals didn't do these social rituals and that prevented them scaling social networks and eventually dying out.
On average, they report, but good vs bad marketing is normally worth much more. So the extremes in great vs bad photo are most likely much more. Paying attention and getting help is worth money.
Feels like the researchers were going for a race/gender angle but it didn’t come through in the data so the result was just super vague “pictures often end up as tie breakers”. Maybe the pictures give hiring managers some utils because they show the person is real or something? Also not clear what control variables they used. Overall just not super clear or convincing. Shoulda done an experiment — although that would have probably wasted even more human capital.
(Clickbait because it's really not much about eyeglasses)
This is really interesting because not so long ago, photos were frowned upon on resumes because they were too obvious a path to racial, gender or class-based discrimination (not that names wouldn't often give it away but still). So that some companies would discuss removing photos or even names.
Now photos are a good way to keep the recruiting process honest by avoiding someone else doing the interview - other than the candidate. Aaaand perhaps discrimination is encouraged again (?) with things like "looking the part" - and no doubt age? Suprised this paper doesn't mention that? How about a tie? Is discriminating on the basis of tie-wearing okay? A fundamental problem with class-based discrimination law: eyeglasses-discrimination is most likely fine.
But some of what the research "uncovers" is really just good marketing: "For graphic designers, [...] have a high quality, professional-looking photo (with a small plus for glasses). Other hacks for programmers: [...] keep a computer visible". I removed the bits about "female" and "beard" - also marketing but less legally acceptable.
"having particular characteristics is comparable to a 5 percent boost in pay" and
"0.3 percent increase in the stars [...] rating". Now that one is shocking and mostly invalidates the study. Because normally good marketing is worth a lot more than that. That hints to me that customers are actually not paying attention to photos? I suspect it's much more extreme in Bad and Great photos (Great not in Professional but in Fitting.)
No, but almost none of them are “good” if “good” is defined as “eliminates all influence of biases irrelevant to performance such that superficial things like appearance play a role not explicable by their ability to predict performance.”
People who are not serious about hiring think this is the goal.
This is not the goal. The goal is to bring people on board who will successfully utilize your resources to bring success to your organization.
Eliminating bias is a red herring. You’re better off trying to increase your bias so that it statistically gets you a higher chance of hiring the people you want.
My most cynical reason for seeking to reduce bias is because I want to hire — as you said — people that will bring success to our organization, without my biases clouding my judgement.
> You’re better off trying to increase your bias
Care to elaborate? That sounds like a terrible idea to me, I'd prefer to hire people based on their skills, not my biases. From the study:
> we do not find a strong correlation between “looking the part” and job performance
If you ask two separate candidates "what is 1 + 1?" and one responds "2" and the other responds "37" but played a card game when they were young, would you hire the latter? (hypotheticals are cheap, but you get my point)
You used the word “mitigate” but in the same post also expressed surprise that any bias effect was left at all, which indicated you expected elimination of the effect from a “good hiring process" rather than mere mitigation.
You responded to a post saying that the effect exists (neither characterizing magnitude nor what the base rate would be without mitigation) and said you were surprised that was the case.
If you only expect mitigation, there would be no basis for surprise, of any degree, at the mere fact of the effect existing.
If it was mitigated somewhat, the effect would still exist.
The issue is the expression of surprise with the mere statement that the effect exists. I’m not confused, you said two things that don't make sense together in one post, each of which is perfectly clear.
Call it a failure-of-imagination on my part, but I can't see any good reason for having a law like that; it gives of the vibes of wanting to protect an establishment based on discrimination.
It's not so much a law but it's such a well-established custom that it might as well be a law: send your application in without a photo and it's pretty much guaranteed to be discarded.
But given that traditionally you always have a job interview before being hired, I don't think that there's much discrimination going on: your face will be known sooner or later anyway.
There is a positive correlation between IQ and corrective vision, so this in turn leads to stereotyping as "those with glasses are higher IQ". There are so many problems caused by Griggs v Ohio (which banned IQ tests for employment).
IQ is not a useful metric (both as far as most prospective employers, and myself, go): what matters more to the bottom-line is total ability to-do-the-job, where soft-skills and EQ matter just-as-much, if not far greater than, a dimenionless scalar that simply indicates' one's ability to do well on IQ tests.
I'm glad IQ tests are banned for employment purposes.
I'm certain you have heard phrases similar to the ones you just wrote before, by people just as clueless about the predictive validity of IQ, as you are.
I'm not disputing that. I just think it's dehumanising to reduce someone down to a single number, especially when so many other factors about a person need to be taken into consideration.
My moral-outrage here is my impression that the OP thinks IQ is all that matters, or that it's valid to make significant life-impacting and (business-impacting) decisions based solely on that number. To me, it's same bad-idea as the UK's "11+" exam system (fortunately now long abandoned) that practically determined someone's entire life based on a single exam taken at age 11.
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Also, I find it somewhat amusing that the more someone cares about high IQ scores, the lower their EQ scores tend to be.
This is actually rational discrimination. Excessive near-work literally causes myopia so one should deduce individuals with glasses have spent more time in front of a computer.
Evidence shows that not getting enough sunlight when young is what causes myopia, as there is a gene involved in stopping the process of natural eye lengthening that is enabled by sunlight. This need not necessarily correlate to excessive work, as children don't play outside for a variety of reasons.
I hope this is being studied intensely in Finland. It has both a strong IT sector and a practice of ensuring kids have plenty of outdoor play/free time.
afaik the jury is still out on this. There is a lot of correlation, but the causal relation is not widely accepted by science yet. Happy to be shown otherwise!
Can't be the only cause though -- I have a -6.0 diopter prescription, needed glasses starting in 2nd grade, and I was outside a lot as a kid (grew up in the 1970s -- staying inside was boring).
I spent my entire childhood reading, my teen years hacking, and my adulthood as a software engineer and gamer. I've spent my life doing all the things mom warned you about. I'm in my 50s and still have 20/20 vision.
Funny you say that, as I just got back from an eye appointment and in my 50s also still have 20/20 vision (after more than 40 years of programming/staring at the screens).
LASIK/PRK laser correction is only a few thousand dollars. I haven’t had myopia since I was 25, and I should not need (reading) glasses again until 45. And of course, contact lenses.
I looked into it when I was 20 and decided that the risk were not worth it. Of course things are probably better 25 years later, I haven't checked again. But then again at almost 50 I now cannot work at a computer without reading glasses and surgery still can't fix that.
A large part of the risk for me was I discovered I can get prescription safety glasses, and if I can't see without glasses I will never risk forgetting to put on safety glasses when I need them.
As far as I understand, there are very few risks these days.
You can even move your eye around while the laser is shaping your cornea, since the laser has the ability to keep track of it and move along with the eye.
One of the best decisions I ever made, in terms of making life more convenient, especially physical activities.
As far as I know, they can adjust for reading distance but you may have to make a choice in terms of what they distance they optimize for. I know people who got surgery after 40 (when your lens tends to be less pliable) that had one eye set for near-sighted and one for far-sighted.
The latter part is true, just FYI for anyone, you do need reading glasses eventually post-Lasik. I had it at age 29, and now at age 45 (and starting around 42) I do need reading glasses for anything closer than about a foot.
And you might go and hire the person that makes sure they always look like they're working over the person who can actually get the job done without breaking a sweat and clock out early.
That's not how myopia works. I had glasses prescribed in childhood; the only thing causing that would be genetics or a couple hours of video games a week.
36% of the US workforce? Stopped reading right there. My experience as an employer tells me they are not entirely trustworthy and that kind of absurd claim confirms it IMHO.
> Freelancers constituted 36 percent of the US workforce in 2021, according to Upwork
The stat seems plausible if you replace "freelancer" with "independent contractors". Although some quick googling surfaces stats closer to 10-20% for the percent of workers who are contractors.
(The majority of these contract jobs aren't ones you would find on Upwork, though)
Before we met her, one of the board members said, "I was told that it always works out that if this person is frumpy and wearing glasses then we should believe her."
She was frumpy. Wore glasses. And 100% correct on her TV time buying recommendations.