A recent study from New York University has raised concerns about potential discrimination against mothers by AI systems used in resume screening by major Fortune 500 companies. The research indicates a bias against women who have taken extended time off for maternity leave.
In the study, hundreds of resumes were fed to four AI models, including ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, all of which consistently rejected resumes with employment gaps related to maternity leave. The technology explained its decisions by stating that including personal information about maternity leave is irrelevant to the job and could be seen as a liability.
The observed trends were described as alarming, considering the widespread use of such AI technology by virtually every major company for resume screening. Siddharth Garg, the lead researcher and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NYU, emphasized the understudied area of potential hiring bias related to employment gaps for parental responsibilities, particularly impacting mothers.
The study utilized a dataset of 2,484 resumes from livecareer.com, introducing sensitive attributes randomly, such as race, gender, maternity/paternity-based employment gaps, pregnancy status, and political affiliation. AI systems were then tasked with summarizing specific resumes and extracting essential information for employment, revealing significant differences between models in generating resume summaries.
ChatGPT tended to exclude political affiliation and pregnancy status from its summaries, while another AI model was more likely to include all sensitive attributes. Google’s Bard often refused to summarize but was more inclined to include sensitive information in generated summaries.
One of the systems justified rejecting resumes with maternity gaps as irrelevant and a potential liability. For pregnancy status, the reasons provided included ‘She is pregnant‘ or ‘Because of her pregnancy.’ Another analysis indicated that certain candidates were deemed unsuitable for political affiliation, with the AI system citing a potential conflict of interest for some employers due to Republican party membership.
