Selection in the Presence of Implicit Bias: The Advantage of Intersectional Constraints

In selection processes such as hiring, promotion, and college admissions, implicit bias toward socially-salient attributes such as race, gender, or sexual orientation produces persistent inequality and reduces utility for the decision-maker. Recent works show that interventions like the Rooney Rule, which require a minimum quota of individuals from each affected group, are very effective in improving utility when individuals belong to at most one affected group. However, in several settings, individuals belong to multiple affected groups and, consequently, face more extreme implicit bias due to this intersectionality. We consider independently drawn utilities and show that, with intersectionality, the aforementioned non-intersectional constraints only recover part of the utility achievable in the absenceof implicit bias. On the other hand, we show that appropriate lower-bound constraints on the intersections recover almost all the utility achievable in the absence of implicit bias. And, hence, offer an advantage over non-intersectional approaches to reducing inequality

A Cabinet That Looks Like Canada: A Critical Evaluation of Media Responses to Trudeau's Representative Cabinet

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the prevailing assumptions underlying how journalists have discussed Trudeau’s gender-balanced cabinet and their relationship to hegemonic power relations in Canada. Utilizing critical feminist and intersectional lenses, these inquiries will be examined through feminist critical discourse analysis of newspaper coverage of Trudeau’s gender-balanced cabinet and related issues raised by a wide range of journalism covering the story, from mainstream to student, ethnic, and Indigenous newspapers. How journalists talk about diverse political representation can reinforce common-knowledge understandings of politics and representation. Overall, I found that hegemonic power structures were reinforced by news media in terms of how journalists constructed political appointments, ethnic minorities, women in politics, Indigenous representation, and scandal. Journalists from alternative newspapers were able to be more critical toward the status quo and hegemonic structures compared with journalists from mainstream newspapers, which are more subject to neoliberal pressures. When mainstream newspapers did amplify marginalized voices, more critical perspectives were added to the discussion at higher circulation rates. News media representations impact the symbolic representation and, in turn, the sociological legitimacy of government institutions. Journalists have the discursive power to support, challenge, construct, and deconstruct political practices, government institutional norms, and public perceptions of individual politicians and their messages

Intra-gender differences and women’s participation in climate change adaptation programs: An intersectional study of gender, caste, and ethnicity in the rural plains of Nepal

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The ACT Report: Action to Catalyze Tech, A Paradigm Shift for DEI

Despite widespread awareness of the lack of DEI in tech and public commitments from tech companies to do better, great uncertainty exists among leaders about how to make real progress.While there are deep pockets of DEI excellence within tech companies themselves, there has never been an attempt to connect this knowledge in a one-stop shop for people and leaders working across tech, nor has there been an effort to catalyze DEI outcomes through collaborative industry-wide action. DEI can't be solved by one company or leader; it requires long-term collective effort.The ACT Report calls for a new paradigm in DEI that is holistic, collective, and long-term. Tech's current approach is often dispersed, individual, and short-term. Despite important progress in DEI, tech companies are too often reduced to poaching each other's talent from underrepresented groups. The paradigm shift described in the ACT Report fundamentally requires a shift in thought and behavior. It is based on values, and provides a blueprint to indivisibly link DEI strategy and business strategy. Companies must bring a business approach to inclusion, and an inclusive approach to business. In other words, DEI and business strategies can no longer be separate. The ACT Report explains what this means in practice.Making the tech industry more inclusive requires a systemic response to a systemic problem. The foundational system that impacts employment opportunity is education. The tech industry, like other industries, must deliver early intervention measures at scale to drive equity from cradle to career. That means tackling educational inequity generally, and increasing access to computer science education specifically.

FEMALE LEADERS CREATING STEPPING LADDERS: Exercising Strategic Agency in Religiously Affiliated Universities of Indonesia and the USA

This paper aims to draw on the lessons and experiences of female leaders for what approaches should be nurtured and adopted in terms of breaking the glass ceiling for their careers. This research examines the pathways to female leaders' success stories to increase women's confidence and the public acceptance of their roles. The article intends to use their struggles to formulate strategies for the next generation of emerging female leaders. Drawing on narratives of five (5) female leaders in five (5) religiously affiliated universities in Indonesia and three (3) in the USA, this article argues that these female leaders are exercising their agency strategically in facing the challenges as well as taking opportunities to achieve senior positions as university leaders. Institutional forces and the collective solidarity of their female and male counterparts have supported them significantly. They have provided what we term 'stepping ladders' after breaking "glass ceilings" to advance their career. However, this has not yet created an "escalator" to render the ascent smoother and easier for other women in academia. The stepping ladders illustrate their further achievement, creating a tool that can assist in this process. However, the tool cannot be a powerful carrier to enable other women to reach the same position. Indeed, exercising their full authority under the shadow of patriarchal domination remains a challenge. The findings of this research enrich the discussions and responses on female leadership issues among academia to expand the contemporary discourse on authority and agency.[Absrak: Artikel ini bertujuan untuk menarik pelajaran dan pengalaman para pemimpin perempuan tentang pendekatan apa yang harus dipupuk dan diadopsi dalam hal mendobrak “langit-langit kaca” untuk karier mereka. Penelitian ini mengkaji jalan menuju kisah sukses para pemimpin perempuan untuk meningkatkan kepercayaan diri perempuan dan penerimaan publik terhadap peran mereka. Artikel ini bermaksud untuk menggunakan perjuangan mereka untuk merumuskan strategi bagi generasi pemimpin perempuan yang baru muncul. Berdasarkan narasi dari lima (5) pemimpin perempuan di lima (5) universitas yang berafiliasi dengan agama di Indonesia dan tiga (3) di Amerika Serikat, artikel ini berargumen bahwa para pemimpin perempuan ini menggunakan agensi mereka secara strategis dalam menghadapi tantangan dan juga mengambil peluang untuk mencapai posisi senior sebagai pemimpin universitas. Kekuatan kelembagaan dan solidaritas kolektif dari rekan-rekan perempuan dan laki-laki telah mendukung mereka secara signifikan. Mereka telah menyediakan apa yang kami sebut sebagai 'tangga loncatan' setelah mendobrak “langit-langit kaca” untuk memajukan karier mereka. Namun, hal ini belum menciptakan "eskalator" untuk membuat pendakian menjadi lebih mulus dan mudah bagi perempuan lain di bidang akademis. Tangga loncatan menggambarkan pencapaian mereka lebih lanjut, menciptakan sebuah alat yang dapat membantu proses ini. Namun, alat ini tidak dapat menjadi sarana yang kuat untuk memungkinkan perempuan lain mencapai posisi yang sama. Temuan penelitian ini memperkaya diskusi dan tanggapan terhadap isu kepemimpinan perempuan di kalangan akademisi untuk memperluas wacana kontemporer tentang otoritas dan agensi.

Causal intersectionality and fair ranking

In this paper we propose a causal modeling approach to intersectional fairness, and a flexible, task-specific method for computing intersectionally fair rankings. Rankings are used in many contexts, ranging from Web search to college admissions, but causal inference for fair rankings has received limited attention. Additionally, the growing literature on causal fairness has directed little attention to intersectionality. By bringing these issues together in a formal causal framework we make the application of intersectionality in algorithmic fairness explicit, connected to important real world effects and domain knowledge, and transparent about technical limitations. We experimentally evaluate our approach on real and synthetic datasets, exploring its behavior under different structural assumptions

Identity: Obstacles and Openings

Progress regarding equality and social identities has moved in a bipolar fashion: popular engagement with the concept of social identities has increased even as courts have signaled decreasing interest in engaging identity. Maintaining and deepening the liberatory potential of identity, particularly in legal and policymaking spheres, will require understanding trends in judicial hostility toward identity politics, the impact of status hierarchy even within minoritized identity groups, and the threat that white racial grievance poses to identitarian claims

Fair Ranking under Disparate Uncertainty

Ranking is a ubiquitous method for focusing the attention of human evaluators on a manageable subset of options. Its use ranges from surfacing potentially relevant products on an e-commerce site to prioritizing college applications for human review. While ranking can make human evaluation far more effective by focusing attention on the most promising options, we argue that it can introduce unfairness if the uncertainty of the underlying relevance model differs between groups of options. Unfortunately, such disparity in uncertainty appears widespread, since the relevance estimates for minority groups tend to have higher uncertainty due to a lack of data or appropriate features. To overcome this fairness issue, we propose Equal-Opportunity Ranking (EOR) as a new fairness criterion for ranking that provably corrects for the disparity in uncertainty between groups. Furthermore, we present a practical algorithm for computing EOR rankings in time $O(n \log(n))$ and prove its close approximation guarantee to the globally optimal solution. In a comprehensive empirical evaluation on synthetic data, a US Census dataset, and a real-world case study of Amazon search queries, we find that the algorithm reliably guarantees EOR fairness while providing effective rankings.Comment: A version of this paper was accepted as Spotlight (Oral) at UAI workshop on Epistemic in AI, 202