Amazon’s Experimental Hiring Tool Allegedly Displayed Gender Bias in Candidate Rankings

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.

Date it happened

2016-08-10

Organisation involved

Amazon

Product, system or model

Amazon experimental AI resume scoring engine, Associated machine learning models trained on historical Amazon resume data

This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.