Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

by Cathy O'Neil

But the industry marches on. Vatterott College, a career-training institute, is a particularly nasty example. A 2012 Senate committee report on for-profit colleges described Vatterott’s recruiting manual, which sounds diabolical. It directs recruiters to target “Welfare Mom w/Kids. Pregnant Ladies. Recent Divorce. Low Self-Esteem. Low Income Jobs. Experienced a Recent Death. Physically/Mentally Abused. Recent Incarceration. Drug Rehabilitation. Dead-End Jobs—No Future.” Why, specifically, were they targeting these folks? Vulnerability is worth gold. It always has been.

Targeting

In 2001 and 2002, before the expansion of automatic résumé readers, researchers from the University of Chicago and MIT sent out five thousand phony résumés for job openings advertised in the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune. The jobs ranged from clerical work to customer service and sales. Each of the résumés was modeled for race. Half featured typically white names like Emily Walsh and Brendan Baker, while the others with similar qualifications carried names like Lakisha Washington and Jamaal Jones, which would sound African American. The researchers found that the white names got 50 percent more callbacks than the black ones.

CV race study