What Happened
Online tutoring firm iTutorGroup programmed its application software to automatically reject female applicants aged 55 and older and male applicants aged 60 and older. More than 200 qualified US-based tutors were screened out solely because of their age, in violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The EEOC sued, and the company settled.
Impact
iTutorGroup paid $365,000 to rejected applicants and accepted five years of EEOC monitoring, mandatory anti-discrimination training, and revised hiring policies. The case was the EEOC's first settlement involving automated hiring discrimination, putting all employers using screening software on notice.
Cost: $365,000 settlement
How to Prevent This
- Audit automated screening rules and models for disparate treatment by age, sex, and race before deployment
- Never encode protected characteristics or their proxies as rejection criteria
- Log and periodically review all auto-rejection decisions with human oversight
- Run regular adverse-impact analyses comparing pass rates across protected groups
- Train HR and engineering teams that anti-discrimination law fully applies to algorithms