• @GenkiFeral
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    23 years ago

    Just an idea, but fairness may be best served by giving all applicants a form that omits sex, sexual-preference, age, race, ethnicity and nationality, and any or most any other possible bias. The company would give the applicant only a number or code to refer to see in they were hired or if the company had any questions. I ran across ONE company that did this (I forget which) a few years ago when i was looking for a job. Most online forms ask applicants for too much info related to things that could be discriminatory. Even your email name could be just that - regardless of it being a first or last name. I also think some of those personality tests need to be scrutinized a bit. Some of the questions can be a yes or no selection, when neither fit, for example. And, if autism is a protected class (not sure if they are), wouldn’t asking certain questions be a bad idea? There are 16 MBTI-types. Which are okay to discriminate against and when or why?

    • @GrassrootsReviewOPM
      link
      23 years ago

      Such things may work when hiring PhD student, but later on you tend to hire people you already know (from earlier collaborations or at leat scientific conferences) or at least their papers. Even in case of PhD students you will want to read their masters thesis and ask their supervisors for advice and it is unavoidable that you learn about where they come from that way.

      The idea of DORA is not to fight discrimination, but to make it easier to hire scientists who are good at doing science rather than good at optimizing metrics. If you have no information on the candidate, only some neutral looking metrics, you would do the opposite.

      There is a similar conflict between open science and fighting discrimination when it comes to open review. You could fight discrimination by double blind review (where both reviewers and authors are not know to each other), but in case people send their manuscripts to a preprint server and we then do the review in the open, then at least the identities of the authors are known.

      • @GenkiFeral
        link
        13 years ago

        peer pressure and popularity contests seem to be more of a problem. I’d guess, if you were purple-skinned, yet had more in common and a more ass-kissing personality, you’d get the job before some one who looked like most other scientists. Personality discrimination scares me. I’ve been reading about (and have experienced) discrimination based on personality - introverts, people who prefer to think independently on almost any subject (situational), autistic… I am an INTP and though I may be very talkative and animated with one coworker out of 30, that breeds a lot of resentment from other coworkers. If a person breaks my trust, i turn ice cold on them, an INTP trait. Personality traits can be influenced and ‘managed’ (are not 100% static), but I’ve read the twin studies about those traits largely being influenced by genetics. Do we really want a world of group-think where we are all alike (regardless of what those traits or preferences are) or would diversity of personalities allow humans more advantage? Complete objectivity in hiring is impossible, but I hope we can keep trying.

        • @GrassrootsReviewOPM
          link
          13 years ago

          At least in the part of science I know almost everyone is an introvert. We could use some extroverts to better communicate with the scary outside world.