“You Gotta be a Doctor, Lin” : An Investigation of Name-Based Bias of Large Language Models in Employment Recommendations

Huy Nghiem, John Prindle, Jieyu Zhao, Hal Daumé Iii


Abstract
Social science research has shown that candidates with names indicative of certain races or genders often face discrimination in employment practices. Similarly, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated racial and gender biases in various applications. In this study, we utilize GPT-3.5-Turbo and Llama 3-70B-Instruct to simulate hiring decisions and salary recommendations for candidates with 320 first names that strongly signal their race and gender, across over 750,000 prompts. Our empirical results indicate a preference among these models for hiring candidates with White female-sounding names over other demographic groups across 40 occupations. Additionally, even among candidates with identical qualifications, salary recommendations vary by as much as 5% between different subgroups. A comparison with real-world labor data reveals inconsistent alignment with U.S. labor market characteristics, underscoring the necessity of risk investigation of LLM-powered systems.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.413
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7268–7287
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.413
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huy Nghiem, John Prindle, Jieyu Zhao, and Hal Daumé Iii. 2024. “You Gotta be a Doctor, Lin” : An Investigation of Name-Based Bias of Large Language Models in Employment Recommendations. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7268–7287, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“You Gotta be a Doctor, Lin” : An Investigation of Name-Based Bias of Large Language Models in Employment Recommendations (Nghiem et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.413.pdf