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   Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:35:18 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

   • Vincent Traag
   • Ludo Waltman

   THREAD: Bias and disparity in a causal modeling framework.

   1. A few months ago, @vtraag and @LudoWaltman posted a superb paper to the arXiv.

   http://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13665

   I've been meaning to write about it for a while and finally found the time.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:45:30 JST Paul Cantrell

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     @ct_bergstrom
     I love this proposed terminology. Great thread.

     In this particular post, it seems to me there is a second crucial observation: addressing disparities is possible too, and requires actively counteracting upstream biases. The SCOTUS majority cooked up their affirmative action decision by ignoring that fact; their logic tacitly assumes that disparities (in the paper’s sense) do not exist, and any attempt to counteract them •must• therefore be bias.

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     Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:45:31 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

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     10. Indeed, as Traag and Waltman illustrate with examples, interventions to correct disparities can backfire when targeted at the wrong stage of a causal pathway. When possible, they are best targeted at the stage where the bias arises.

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     Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:45:32 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

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     9. Why does it matter?

     At a very basic level, it's important to point to the immediate causal sources of problems that one wants to remedy, because those sources are the best targets for interventions.

     Telling women to cite themselves more frequently is not necessarily going to be a fruitful remedy to a self-citation disparity if men and women with similar numbers of previous publications cite themselves at similar rates, and the disparity is driven by an upstream cause (publication number).

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     Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:45:33 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

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     8. Subsequent work suggests that much of the difference is due to such mediating factors, most notably gender differences in the number of publications that men and women have available to self-cite. This makes the difference in self-citation rates a disparity, not a bias, using present terminology.

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     Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:45:35 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

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     7. We considered it unjustified, and so we called it a bias. But we didn't know (and stated this upfront) whether the difference was directly caused by men and women making different choices about self-citation, or whether there were other mediating factors such as previous publication record.

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     Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:45:36 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

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     6. Biases upstream in a causal pathway lead to disparities downstream even when subsequent causal processes are fair.

     If I'd had access to this paper back a few years ago when I wrote about what I called a gender bias in self-citation rates, I would have written a better paper.

     In paper we identified a difference in self-citation rates by gender.

     https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023117738903

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     Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:45:37 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

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     5. They define disparities as (1) unjustified (2) causal differences that are (3) causally indirect.

     For example, if the education system denies opportunities to people of a certain race and thus they cannot even apply for employment at a firm, racial differences in employment at that firm will be unjustified, caused by race, but (assuming. a fair hiring manager) indirectly so.

     These are disparities.

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     Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:45:38 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

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     4. They define biases as differences due to (1) we consider unjustified that are (2) causal and (3) causally direct.

     For example, if a hiring manager chose not to hire people of a certain race, the racial differences in employment in that firm would be unjustified, caused by race, and directly so.

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     Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:45:39 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

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     3. In this paper, Traag and Waltman propose definitions and methodology for thinking more rigorously about the nature of these differences, in ways that help us identify where we can best intervene to ameliorate them.

     To do so, they propose that we distinguish between *biases* and *disparities*.

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     Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)'s status on Monday, 03-Jul-2023 00:45:40 JST Carl T. Bergstrom

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     2. Society is rife with differences that we feel are unjust.

     Differences in opportunities and outcomes according to race are ubiquitous in American society.

     Or in science, I've written about gender differences in scientific authorship and citation, for example.

     We often call these "biases".