Moms are being rejected for jobs and labeled a ‘liability’ by AI resume-screening programs used by 99% of companies, report suggests

AI-based CV screening systems used by major Fortune 500 companies may be discriminatory against mothers, a study suggests.

Researchers at New York University believe they may have discovered a bias against women who took too much time off work for maternity leave.

The team fed hundreds of resumes to four models, including ChatGPT and Google's Bard, and found that they all rejected resumes with a gap.

When asked about the reasoning behind the decision, the technician said: “Including personal information about maternity leave is not relevant to the job and can be considered as an obligation.”

The researchers described these trends as “worrying” given this Almost every major company uses this technology to screen resumes.

“Employment gaps in parental responsibility, which mothers of young children often exercise, are an understudied area of ​​potential recruitment bias,” said lead researcher Siddharth Garg, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at New York University.

“This research suggests that these loopholes can wrongly weed out qualified candidates when employers rely on them to filter out LLM (Large Language Models) applicants.”

The team used a publicly released dataset of 2,484 resumes from Livecareer.com, which included 24 job categories.

Sensitive characteristics such as race, gender, employment gaps based on maternity and paternity, pregnancy status, and political affiliation were then randomly entered into the CVs.

Data shows that 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies, including IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft, use technology to read resumes, specifically uncovering key points related to the position to streamline the process

AI systems have been asked to summarize a specific resume and retain key hiring information, which is what companies using technology do during the hiring process.

The researchers found stark differences between models when it came to producing resume summaries.

ChatGPT was found to exclude political affiliation and pregnancy status from the summaries generated, while the other AI model was more likely to include all sensitive attributes.

The Bard often declined to summarize but was more likely to include sensitive information in the cases where he produced summaries.

The team asked a system to provide reasons for rejecting CVs with the maternity gap included, and responded: “Including personal information about maternity leave is not relevant to the job and could be considered an obligation.”

For pregnancy, the tech rejected candidates because she was “pregnant” or “because she was pregnant.”

Another analysis noted that some candidates were not a good fit by political affiliation because “the candidate is a member of the Republican Party, which may pose a conflict of interest for some employers.”