Airbnb takes aim at reducing racial bias among users
Washington Post
In response to growing complaints of racial bias among its users, the home-sharing company Airbnb will beef up its nondiscrimination policy, do more to diversify its own workforce and offer implicit bias training to its hosts, according to a report released Thursday after a three-month review by the company.
But Airbnb will not, for now, concede to critics one of their chief requests — abandoning the user photos that make it easy to identify online who is a minority.
“After thoroughly analyzing this issue, I came to believe that Airbnb guests should not be asked or required to hide behind curtains of anonymity when trying to find a place to stay,” writes the report’s author, Laura Murphy, a former longtime American Civil Liberties Union official who was brought on as an adviser to lead Airbnb’s review. “Technology can bring us together and technology shouldn’t ask us to hide who we are. Instead, we should be implementing new, creative solutions to fight discrimination and promote understanding.”
By the end of the year, the company is vowing instead to experiment with reducing the visibility of photos on booking pages and promoting in their place other reputation information, such as reviews. The issue has been a thorny one for the company, which argues that photos — as well as real names — are necessary to create trust and ensure safety on a platform where millions of strangers rent space in each others’ private homes.
Academic research has found discrimination among Airbnb hosts against guests with blacksounding names. And critics have argued that the design of the site — with such information prominently displayed — may more easily enable discrimination, making the company responsible for the behavior of users acting even on implicit biases. Airbnb’s own research, the company acknowledges in the report, “generally confirmed public reports that minorities struggle more than others to book a listing.”
Among the other promised changes, Airbnb will create a new feature automatically blocking calendar dates once a host rejects a potential guest. That would potentially prevent hosts from denying a user based on their race, only to offer the rental for the same dates to someone else, as has occurred according to some of the reported complaints.
Under another new policy, the company also vows to immediately find alternative, comparable accommodations for guests who have experienced discrimination, even if that means pointing them to a traditional hotel room when no other Airbnb options exist and potentially subsidizing the price difference.
In the revised nondiscrimination policy, the company is more explicit that hosts cannot decline guests based on their color, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or marital status. (If a host is sharing their living space, however, they can request guests of the same gender.)