Fairness in representation: quantifying stereotyping as a representational harm

Mohsen Abbasi, Sorelle A. Friedler, Carlos Scheidegger, Suresh Venkatasubramanian

Abstract: While harms of allocation have been increasingly studied as part of the subfield of algorithmic fairness, harms of representation have received considerably less attention. In this paper, we formalize two notions of stereotyping and show how they manifest in later allocative harms within the machine learning pipeline. We also propose mitigation strategies and demonstrate their effectiveness on synthetic datasets.