Machines Are Learning to Be Sexist Like Humans. Luckily, They’re Easier to Fix.
The researchers also asked the algorithm to complete a set of analogies, drawing parallels based on the text it had analyzed. Some—such as “man is to woman as king is to queen"—were relatively innocuous, others much less so. When asked what the female equivalent of “surgeon” was, the algorithm returned “nurse”. When asked the female equivalent of “computer programmer”, it returned “homemaker”. This is especially poignant in industries where women are already paid thousands of dollars less than men.
Source: Vice Magazine
New data suggests women write better code:
A group of student researchers set out to determine whether people are biased against code written by women, and discovered the opposite: Code written by women has a higher acceptance rate on the social coding site GitHub than code written by men.
But there’s one tremendous caveat; this is only the case when the individual’s gender is unknown to GitHub users.
Source: dailydot.com
New data suggests women write better code:
A group of student researchers set out to determine whether people are biased against code written by women, and discovered the opposite: Code written by women has a higher acceptance rate on the social coding site GitHub than code written by men.
But there’s one tremendous caveat; this is only the case when the individual’s gender is unknown to GitHub users.
Source: dailydot.com
Microsoft faces A class action lawsuit from former employee and noted computer security researcher Katie Moussouris. The suit claims that during Moussouris’s seven years at Microsoft, she and other women were unfairly discriminated against on the basis of their gender, passed over for raises and promotions, and ranked below their male counterparts during bi-annual performance reviews.
Moussouris was instrumental in prompting Microsoft to launch its first bug bounty program in 2013, something the company resisted for years. The program pays researchers who find security vulnerabilities in its software. After resigning from Microsoft in May, Moussouris took a job as chief policy officer at HackerOne, which helps companies manage bug bounty programs and communicate with security researchers.
With her complaint, filed Wednesday, Moussouris paints a picture that isn’t altogether unlike other gender discrimination suits recently seen in the tech industry. In the wake of the high-profile trial between Ellen Pao and her former employer, Kleiner Perkins, women brought discrimination suits against Facebook and Twitter, too. But Moussouris shines a harsh light on a dynamic that plagued Microsoft’s culture for years.
Source: Wired