AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

In mock interviews for software engineering jobs, recent AI models that evaluated responses rated men less favorably – particularly those with Anglo-Saxon names, according to recent research.

The goal of the study, conducted by Celeste De Nadai as an undergraduate thesis project at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, was to investigate whether current-generation LLMs demonstrate bias when presented with gender data and with names that allow cultural inferences to be made.

De Nadai, also chief marketing officer at AI content biz Monok, told The Register in a phone interview her interest in the topic followed from prior reports about bias in older AI models. She pointed to a recent Bloomberg article that questioned the use of neural networks for recruitment due to name-based bias.

"There wasn't any research with a larger dataset that was using the latest models," explained De Nadai. "The research that I've ...