Wouldn’t most group-based heuristics be useless when self-selection is involved?
Let’s assume we care about strength, and that men are significantly stronger than women (I’m cutting corners for simplicity’s sake).
If you’re looking for people to mug in the street, and all else being equal prefer a weak victim, then you’re better off targeting women than men—it’s a useful heuristic.
However, if you’re hiring people for a job that requires strength, people will only apply if they think they have a chance, then you should expect about the same distribution of strength among the man and women who apply—any sex-based heuristic is useless.
You’d think so, but from my experience screening resumes tons and tons of people who are not qualified or obviously don’t fit very simple criteria still apply to jobs. I wasted time reading resumes of people who shouldn’t have even applied, and I wasn’t even doing any interviewing.
Strength is also a lot less fuzzy than intelligence/capability in general. Warehouse jobs can say “Must be able to lift x pounds to y height regularly” or whatever so it’s obvious what the job requires and easy for the person to know if they can do it. It’s harder to quantify being smart, or having knowledge of certain fields, or ability to sell products. This means that it’s more effort on the part of people applying to know whether they should (which means they’ll probably just apply because you might as well) AND more effort on the part of the hirer to figure out who is qualified.
Wouldn’t most group-based heuristics be useless when self-selection is involved?
Let’s assume we care about strength, and that men are significantly stronger than women (I’m cutting corners for simplicity’s sake).
If you’re looking for people to mug in the street, and all else being equal prefer a weak victim, then you’re better off targeting women than men—it’s a useful heuristic.
However, if you’re hiring people for a job that requires strength, people will only apply if they think they have a chance, then you should expect about the same distribution of strength among the man and women who apply—any sex-based heuristic is useless.
You’d think so, but from my experience screening resumes tons and tons of people who are not qualified or obviously don’t fit very simple criteria still apply to jobs. I wasted time reading resumes of people who shouldn’t have even applied, and I wasn’t even doing any interviewing.
Strength is also a lot less fuzzy than intelligence/capability in general. Warehouse jobs can say “Must be able to lift x pounds to y height regularly” or whatever so it’s obvious what the job requires and easy for the person to know if they can do it. It’s harder to quantify being smart, or having knowledge of certain fields, or ability to sell products. This means that it’s more effort on the part of people applying to know whether they should (which means they’ll probably just apply because you might as well) AND more effort on the part of the hirer to figure out who is qualified.
Less useful, not necessarily entirely useless. Depends on who rational the people doing the self-selection are.