Besides the legal issues with discrimination and disparate impact, another important issue here is that jobs that involve making decisions about people tend to be high-status. As a very general tendency, the higher-status a profession is, the more its practitioners are likely to organize in a guild-like way and resist intrusive innovations by outsiders—especially innovations involving performance metrics that show the current standards of the profession in a bad light, or even worse, those that threaten a change in the way their work is done that might lower its status.
Discussions of such cases in medicine are a regular feature on Overcoming Bias, but it exists in a more or less pronounced form in any other high-status profession too. How much it accounts for the specific cases discussed in the above article is a complex question, but this phenomenon should certainly be considered as a plausible part of the explanation.
Besides the legal issues with discrimination and disparate impact, another important issue here is that jobs that involve making decisions about people tend to be high-status. As a very general tendency, the higher-status a profession is, the more its practitioners are likely to organize in a guild-like way and resist intrusive innovations by outsiders—especially innovations involving performance metrics that show the current standards of the profession in a bad light, or even worse, those that threaten a change in the way their work is done that might lower its status.
Discussions of such cases in medicine are a regular feature on Overcoming Bias, but it exists in a more or less pronounced form in any other high-status profession too. How much it accounts for the specific cases discussed in the above article is a complex question, but this phenomenon should certainly be considered as a plausible part of the explanation.