Do Large Language Models Discriminate in Hiring Decisions on the Basis of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender?

Haozhe An, Christabel Acquaye, Colin Wang, Zongxia Li, Rachel Rudinger


Abstract
We examine whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit race- and gender-based name discrimination in hiring decisions, similar to classic findings in the social sciences (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004). We design a series of templatic prompts to LLMs to write an email to a named job applicant informing them of a hiring decision. By manipulating the applicant’s first name, we measure the effect of perceived race, ethnicity, and gender on the probability that the LLM generates an acceptance or rejection email. We find that the hiring decisions of LLMs in many settings are more likely to favor White applicants over Hispanic applicants. In aggregate, the groups with the highest and lowest acceptance rates respectively are masculine White names and masculine Hispanic names. However, the comparative acceptance rates by group vary under different templatic settings, suggesting that LLMs’ race- and gender-sensitivity may be idiosyncratic and prompt-sensitive.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-short.37
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
386–397
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.37
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haozhe An, Christabel Acquaye, Colin Wang, Zongxia Li, and Rachel Rudinger. 2024. Do Large Language Models Discriminate in Hiring Decisions on the Basis of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender?. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 386–397, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Do Large Language Models Discriminate in Hiring Decisions on the Basis of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender? (An et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.37.pdf