Lady Business: Artificial intelligence, teen sex, and background reading; Hollywood horror stories

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 92nd issue, published Feb 7, 2020.
 

Ghost in the Hiring Machine

“A.I. is like teenage sex,” says Frida Polli. “Everyone says they’re doing it, and nobody really knows what it is.”

So as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I have my first feature in Fortune’s snazzily-redesigned February issue, now on newsstands. As part of our cover package on artificial intelligence, I reported on the many, many ways that big companies are using A.I. to recruit, hire, manage, and sometimes even fire their employees:

As a job seeker, you might have your application vetted by a Mya Systems chatbot at L’Oréal or PepsiCo. You could respond to an A.I.-crafted job posting vetted by Textio, perhaps at Expedia Group or ViacomCBS. You could be asked to play Pymetrics games not only at Kraft Heinz but also at Unilever or JPMorgan Chase. You could record one of the automated HireVue video interviews used by Hilton and Delta Air Lines.

Your relationship with A.I. may extend past the job offer too. Once hired, you might find yourself filling out employee-engagement surveys designed by Microsoft’s LinkedIn, where your answers could help set your manager’s performance targets. Your employer could tap you for promotion opportunities identified by Workday’s A.I. If you work at an Amazon warehouse and miss your productivity goals, in-house systems could recommend that you be fired. On the other hand, if you work at IBM and plan to quit, in-house systems might guess your plans and warn your managers that they should try to make you happy. 

What could go wrong? Especially since this technology is being used at scale, affecting (conservatively) millions of workers, without being fully understood -- or regulated. I had the privilege of discussing that question with SiriusXM’s Torin Ellis, host of Career Mix, and with my Fortune colleague Ellen McGirt, who wrote about it in her daily RaceAhead newsletter. (Among several other Fortune newsletters where this story got to make an appearance!)
 
The central question of my reporting, and why I’m writing about it in Lady Business, had to do with the question of human bias as reflected by the software we create. Can an algorithm really eliminate racism, sexism and other human prejudices from the hiring and management process? Or will it wind up amplifying the biases of its creators?
 

Machines are as likely to amplify biases as they are to sidestep them. That’s especially problematic when the people designing the tools are predominantly white and male, as is the case in much of the tech industry. “A machine-learning algorithm is like a toddler; it will learn from its environment,” Polli says. “We haven’t had a diverse group at the table creating this technology to date.”

So in some ways this topic was squarely central to my reporting interests and experience. In other ways (as the increasing volume of A.I.-related pitches in my inbox can attest*) it was a relatively new beat for me. I had previously covered some startups and entrepreneurs in the field, including Pymetrics co-founder Frida Polli, at Inc.; but I hadn’t previously reported deeply on artificial intelligence as a central subject. (*Not an invitation.)

Which is a terrifying and exhilarating opportunity as a reporter, and one of the reasons I love writing features. Diving into a new subject is always a thrill, provided that there are smart experts willing to spend their time discussing it with you, and that you’re willing to spend a lot of time reading up on it before you start asking for their time. These are some of the articles and texts that I found particularly useful for informing my understanding of A.I. -- and that I’d recommend for anyone wanting to understand more about the impact of this widespread yet still-very-nascent technology:
 
--This 2018 feature about “unmasking A.I.’s bias problem” from my Fortune colleague Jonathan Vanian laid out many of the nuanced questions surrounding the technology today.
 
--This 2019 academic paper from Cornell’s Ifeoma Ajunwa dives deep into the many ways that automation can amplify employment discrimination.
 
--This 2018 report by technology-focused think tank Upturn examines the various (good and bad) impacts that A.I. has specifically on hiring, and has some recommendations around regulation.
 
--This October investigation of HireVue from the Washington Post reported on the extent to which automated facial analysis -- and, a federal privacy watchdog argues, extremely problematic and racist facial recognition technology – is becoming a part of the job-interview process.
 
--And this 14,000-word New Yorker novella about Amazon and Jeff Bezos covered, among many other topics, retail monopolies, antitrust regulation, Birkenstocks, the breakup of Bezos’ marriage, the creation of Alexa, attempted blackmail, and the by-most-accounts miserable (and A.I.-assisted) working conditions in the company’s warehouses: “More than a hundred thousand people work at Amazon’s fulfillment centers, and nearly everything they do is digitally tracked and evaluated, meaning that if someone falls behind—even for just a few minutes—it can be grounds for reprimand. … A company document explains, ‘Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality of productivity without input from supervisors.’” 

Lady Bits

--"The high price tag for patients--the average IVF baby costs $40,000 to $60,000, which comes out of pocket for most people--has allowed founders and investors to frame their work as democratizing treatment and improving access, all while positioning themselves to make a lot of money doing it.” In the same issue, my Fortune colleague Beth Kowitt has a terrific feature on the growing, emotionally-fraught, and opportunistic fertility industry.
 
--“While presidential candidates answer hundreds of questions about the economy, they’re rarely asked about the economic issues that most directly affect women.” And my colleague Emma Hinchliffe spearheaded this impressive, months-long Fortune collaboration with Times Up, asking all of the candidates -- and the current president -- to address these questions head-on.
 
--Can $16.7 million dollars make Chicago -- or each of two other yet-to-be-named cities -- into a more inclusive Silicon Valley? I wrote about why Melinda Gates is betting it can.
 
--A week after a renewed public debate over what sort of uncritical hagiographies we owe public figures upon their deaths, many on Twitter reacted to news of Kirk Douglas’s death by recirculating the rumors that he raped Natalie Wood when she was 16. (And also that he might have been involved in the disappearance and probable death of another young woman he co-starred with.)
 
--Speaking of men behaving badly in Hollywood: Boy do I not care about most of the Oscar movies this year. And this article from the summer about Quentin Tarantino’s excessive “shittiness toward women” in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood makes me care even less! (Related: “Stop blaming history for your all-white, all-male movie.”)
 
--Finally, happiest of birthdays to my wonderful mother! And a shout-out to my friend Sandra Fluke, a remarkable woman who’s one of the hardest-working, most resilient, and impressive people I know. I might even say she’s medal-worthy!
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com