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."

Comments

Re:In other words. . .

[Opportunist]

Hire someone with kids? You nuts? Every other day that rugrat is sick and your employer is late 'cause they have to drop it off with some daycare, they want to take days off 'cause it screeches in some school show. Not to mention that I cannot relocate them without a hassle. Or have them work late 'cause they got to be home for their dependents...