London | Amazon has scrapped a "sexist" internal tool that used artificial intelligence to sort through job applications.
The program was created by a team at Amazon's Edinburgh office in 2014 as a way to sort through CVs and pick out the most promising candidates. However, it taught itself to prefer male candidates over female ones, members of the team told Reuters.
They noticed that it was penalising CVs that included the word "women's", such as "women's chess club captain". It also reportedly downgraded graduates of two all-women's colleges.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Women make up 40 per cent of Amazon's workforce. AP
The problem stemmed from the fact that the system was trained on data submitted by people over a 10-year period, most of which came from men.
The AI was tweaked in an attempt to fix the bias. However, last year, Amazon lost faith in its ability to be neutral and abandoned the project. Amazon recruiters are believed to have used the system to look at the recommendations when hiring, but did not rely on the rankings. Currently, women make up 40 per cent of Amazon's workforce.