If Workday Loses This Lawsuit, Will Your Firm Risk Discrimination Charges?

A lawsuit filed in federal court alleges that Workday, the dominant human resources platform, uses artificial tools that discriminate against job applicants on the basis of race, sex or age.

The suit, Mobley v. Workday, is being argued in he U.S. District Court in Northern California. The theory of the case is explained in an amended complaint:

"Defendant’s discriminatory conduct arises from its policy and practice of using automated, algorithm-driven systems—in lieu of individualized human review—to evaluate and screen applicants at scale. These systems are trained on historical data and prior hiring outcomes and are designed to identify patterns and relationships between applicant characteristics and hiring decisions. Once deployed, the system applies those learned relationships to new applicants in order to predict whether they should be advanced or rejected.

"Because these systems rely on historical data and statistical modeling, they reproduce and amplify disparities embedded in prior hiring decisions and labor market structures. Bias may enter the system through multiple pathways, including the composition of training data, the selection and weighting of input variables, the design of model objectives, and the evaluation criteria used to assess candidate “fit.”

"Even where protected characteristics such as race, age, sex, or disability are not explicitly provided to the system, they can be inferred through correlated variables. For example, employment gaps may reflect disability or health conditions, years of experience ay serve as a proxy for age, educational background and institutional affiliations may correlate with race, and other application data may reflect gender or caregiving responsibilities. Through these proxy variables, the system is capable of reproducing discriminatory outcomes without explicitly classifying applicants by protected characteristics."

Needless to say, Workday denies the charges. In our litigious society, it's not too much of a stretch to expect that if the plaintiffs are successful, similar cases will be filed in other states and may be filed against individual employers that use Workday or similar systems.