HireHer

Tools to reduce gender gap and prevent unconscious bias in hiring process.

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Problem Statement

How can we get employers to be open and hire women who have less social mobility and may not have access to livelihood opportunities?

While researching how to increase the employment of women who have less social mobility, we found that a big problem with women's employment is gender discrimination while hiring. Many areas in the hiring process can be improved; we have focused our solutions on two primary and crucial aspects: the job application and the interview.

Our Solutions

NeuralizeIt

  • Gender discrimination when hiring is not the fault of the employer alone. Employers may be guilty of their unconscious biases; however, women are implicitly discouraged from applying to jobs due to the gendered verbs in many job application adverts.

  • Women need to be more empowered to apply for open job opportunities. However, studies have shown that "masculine worded job descriptions significantly deterred women from applying to jobs regardless of whether the job was stereotypically male, female, or gender-neutral" (Gaucher et al., 2011) (Gender Discrimination and Bias in Job Descriptions). Therefore, our Chrome Extension Application NeutralizeIt attempts to resolve this issue.

  • The Chrome Extension will curate any HTML page and replace gendered verbs with neutral alternatives. The hope is to help empower women to shed their own biases to job opportunities and, in turn, increase their employment.

How it's Built

  • The extension is coded in client-side JS with jQuery. We chose to use jQuery because we would be accessing and manipulating HTML dom elements; therefore, the abstractions provided by the jQuery library made it easier to code our project.

AnonymizeIt

  • While NeutralizeIt addresses the issue of women not applying for jobs due to their own perceived biases. The problem still exists on the employer side. 79% of HR professionals agree that unconscious bias exists in the hiring process (CMiC, 2021). Furthermore, research has shown that applicants with male names are 40% more likely to be called for an interview than female names (Souza & Doyle, 2020). While many places in the hiring process can be improved, we have focused our next solution on the interview process.

  • Employers should have the choice to conduct "blind interviews" to reduce their own unconscious biases that could affect the hiring process. The Telegram Bot AnonymizeIt addresses this issue by allowing two parties to communicate completely anonymously and privately. AnonoymizeIt is a telegram bot that acts as a third party between an interviewer and interviewee.

How it's Built

  • The telegram bot was created in NodeJs and hosted on a remote host on Google Cloud. The creation of the bot was aided with NodeJs's Telegram-Bot-API library. The abstractions provided made it extremely simple to write logic that controlled the bot's behaviours. The program's design is Object-Oriented, with each user belonging to a session with a unique key. This made it easy to traverse, return and search all ongoing sessions.

  • The program is entirely stateless and keeps no record of any messages being sent between parties. This will, hence, protect the privacy of all the users involved with the bot. The inherently modular design will also make the bot extensible and futureproof.

Challenges

  • Recursively parsing through elements in an HTML dom to effectively edit HTML without destroying the already established structure.
  • Generating word bank of gendered words with accurate and neutral replacements

What We Learned

  • jQuery
  • How to make a Telegram bot
  • How to make a Google Chrome Extension
  • How to use Google Cloud

Potential Improvements

  • Expand word bank for NeutralizeIt to include more gendered words and variations
  • Implement a management system for AnonymizeIt for recruiters to communicate with multiple applicants at the same time
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