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The Privilege Embedded in your Unit of Analysis

The Privilege Embedded in your Unit of Analysis

How much water per bouquet? If we watered them all using the average required per bouquet, we’d over water one and underwater one. What’s the problem: we’re using the denominator of bouquets instead of flowers. Defining your denominator is as important as defining...
Measure Upstream Discrimination

Measure Upstream Discrimination

When we try to measure gaps in outcomes between groups, we often turn to an approach called a Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition. I’m all for identifying discriminatory gaps, but we need to be careful that we don’t discount certain kinds of discrimination from our data...
Crafting Models for Equity

Crafting Models for Equity

Author’s Note: This is going to be a long piece, but if we can get this concept down we’ll learn a way to embed our equity priorities deep, deep into the mathematical heart of our data work. Let’s go. The Model: A reflection of the world as the modeller understands...
The First Step in Equitable Predictions

The First Step in Equitable Predictions

When we use data to predict something, there’s more than one way to improve the equity of that process. The one that we usually start with is setting a tolerance level for the gap between the group our predictive model works best for and the one it performs worst at....