Concerns about online manipulation have centered on fears about undermining the autonomy of consumers and citizens. Less analyzed are the risks that the same techniques of personalizing information online can also threaten equality. When predictive algorithms are used to allocate information about opportunities like employment, housing and credit, they can reproduce past patterns of discrimination and exclusion in these markets. In this talk, I will focus on the labor market and the increasingly dominant role of tech intermediaries in managing interactions between job-seekers and firms. Because these intermediaries rely on past behavioral data to distribute information about job openings and match job-seekers with hiring firms, their predictions about who will be a good match for which jobs will likely reflect existing occupational segregation and inequality. I will discuss the legal and policy implications of tech intermediaries' new role in labor markets, including the challenges in holding them responsible for discriminatory effects and the possibility of other regulatory responses that might address these concerns.
Link: Youtube Live
Pauline Kim is the Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor Washington University Law School in St. Louis. She is a nationally recognized expert on the law governing the workplace and has written widely on issues affecting workers, including privacy, discrimination and job security, as well as the impact of technology in the workplace. Her research focuses on the risks of unfairness and bias as automated decision-processes are incorporated into firms' personnel decision-making and the legal challenges posed by these technological developments. She is studying the role of technological intermediaries in shaping labor markets, and the possibilities for artificially intelligent systems to avoid human biases in making personnel decisions. She is a graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and Harvard Law School, and clerked for the Honorable Cecil F. Poole on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Following her clerkship, she worked as a staff attorney at the Employment Law Center/Legal Aid Society of San Francisco.