Quota-based debiasing can decrease representation of the most under-represented groups

Royal Society Open Science, vol. 8, pp. 210821

Abstract

Many important decisions in societies such as school admissions, hiring or elections are based on the selection of top-ranking individuals from a larger pool of candidates. This process is often subject to biases, which typically manifest as an under-representation of certain groups among the selected or accepted individuals. The most common approach to this issue is debiasing, for example, via the introduction of quotas that ensure a proportional representation of groups with respect to a certain, often binary attribute. This, however, has the potential to induce changes in representation with respect to other attributes. For the case of two correlated binary attributes, we show that quota-based debiasing based on a single attribute can worsen the representation of the most under-represented intersectional groups and decrease the overall fairness of selection. Our results demonstrate the importance of including all relevant attributes in debiasing procedures and that more efforts need to be put into eliminating the root causes of inequalities as purely numerical solutions such as quota-based debiasing might lead to unintended consequences.

Authors 3

1. Ivan Smirnov corresponding Aachen Department for Society, Technology and Human Factors Department of Computer Science

   RWTH Aachen University · National Research University Higher School of Economics

   Affiliation as printed

   Department for Society, Technology and Human Factors and Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

   Institute of Education, HSE University, Moskva, Moskva, Russian Federation

2. Florian Lemmerich

   University of Passau

   Affiliation as printed

   Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Passau, Passau, Bayern, Germany

3. Markus Strohmaier Aachen Department for Society, Technology and Human Factors Department of Computer Science

   RWTH Aachen University · GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

   Affiliation as printed

   Department for Society, Technology and Human Factors and Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

   Department of Computational Social Science, GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany