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Airbnb Unveils Changes To Address Racial Discrimination (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Acknowledging that his company has "been slow on this issue," Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky is rolling out changes aimed at addressing discrimination complaints against the home rental service. Among the changes: de-emphasizing the role of user photos in arranging stays. Here are some of the other changes Airbnb announced Thursday: Providing assistance to people who feel they've experienced discrimination; Anti-bias training for all staff; Setting public diversity goals for staff; Partnering with historically black colleges and universities to strengthen their recruitment pipeline. The move comes after longstanding complaints from African-American Airbnb customers who said their booking requests were turned down at a high rate. Black Airbnb users vented their frustration with the phenomenon of being rejected for a booking date -- only to see the same place get listed once again -- spawning the hashtag #AirbnbWhileBlack on Twitter. And those frustrations were borne out in a study that sent 6,400 requests to AirBnb hosts in five large U.S. cities; the requests were identical except for the customer's name. As the Hidden Brain podcast reported, "requests with African-American sounding names were roughly 16 percent less likely to be accepted than their white-sounding counterparts."
the company is telling its employees what policies to implement, instructing their employees on how to behave, and overall exercising control over its employees. Just like a hotel does.
Except that training staff and setting diversity goals for recruitment is not going to do anything when it is the *hosts* that are discriminating. In most cases, if the host also lives there, it is not even illegal to discriminate. Most places have rules that let you discriminate on gender and other random requirements when dealing with roommates or in some cases even sharing a close dwelling like a duplex.