‘Liability’: Moms Face Built-in Bias from AI Resume-Screeners, Study Finds

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Mothers face yet another hurdle as they try to re-enter the workforce after maternity leave: Artificial intelligence.

A study conducted by researchers at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering found that AI programs that were used to screen resumes exhibited what appears to be bias against women who stopped working to care for their children.

The AI programs went so far as to label maternity-leave information on a resume as “a liability,” researchers said in an NYU news release.

The NYU study was submitted presented Dec. 15 during a workshop at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in New Orleans.

The researchers analyzed three “large language model” advanced AI programs: ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Bard.

These AI programs are used by Fortune 500 companies to screen resumes and match potential applicants with open positions, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.

The researchers found that as information such as maternity leave and breaks taken from work for the sake of child care were added to the resumes, that information had a significant effect on how the resumes were read by the AI screening programs.

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