Amazon Scrapped Its AI Recruiting Tool After It Systematically Downgraded Women's Resumes

Amazon built an AI hiring tool trained on 10 years of resumes, and it learned to penalize resumes that included the word "women's" — as in women's chess club — and downgraded graduates of all-women's colleges. The model had absorbed historical male-dominated hiring patterns and effectively replicated them at scale. Amazon quietly disbanded the team in 2017 after realizing the bias could not easily be corrected.