Related papers: Is diversity good?
Technology is a cornerstone of modern life, yet the software engineering field struggles to reflect the diversity of contemporary society. This lack of diversity and inclusivity within the software industry can be traced back to limited…
Several different fairness notions have been introduced in the context of fair allocation of goods. In this manuscript, we compare between some fairness notions that are used in settings in which agents have arbitrary (perhaps unequal)…
The American Physical Society calls on its members to improve the diversity of physics by supporting an inclusive culture that encourages women and Black, Indigenous, and people of color to become physicists. In the current educational…
Spreadsheets are ubiquitous, heavily relied on throughout vast swathes of finance, commerce, industry, academia and Government. They are also acknowledged to be extraordinarily and unacceptably prone to error. If these two points are…
In this paper, we study university admissions under a centralized system that uses grades and standardized test scores to match applicants to university programs. We consider affirmative action policies that seek to increase the number of…
Background: We present an analysis of interviews with 27 self-identified progressive white-male physics faculty and graduate students discussing race and gender in physics. White men dominate most STEM fields and are particularly…
We study the role of information and access in capacity-constrained selection problems with fairness concerns. We develop a statistical discrimination framework, where each applicant has multiple features and is potentially strategic. The…
In Machine Learning, an accepted definition of fairness of a decision taken by a classifier is that it should not depend on protected features, such as gender. Unfortunately, when constraints exist between features, such dependencies can be…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
We study a two-stage model, in which students are 1) admitted to college on the basis of an entrance exam which is a noisy signal about their qualifications (type), and then 2) those students who were admitted to college can be hired by an…
Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical…
In an academic landscape where female physicists are still strongly underrepresented, underlying causes like unconscious gender bias deserve specific attention. Members of academia are often not aware of their intrinsic, hence unconscious,…
When software is designed by people from diverse identities and experiences, it is more likely to be inclusive and address a broader range of user needs. However, for transgender and non-binary students in software engineering, the path to…
Algorithmic modeling relies on limited information in data to extrapolate outcomes for unseen scenarios, often embedding an element of arbitrariness in its decisions. A perspective on this arbitrariness that has recently gained interest is…
Human creativity is a multifaceted phenomenon with cognitive, attitudinal, intrapersonal interpersonal, practical, socio-cultural, economic, and environmental aspects. It can be challenging to incorporate creativity in classrooms. Teachers…
Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used in high-stakes settings, yet multiplicity - the existence of multiple good models - means that some predictions are essentially arbitrary. ML researchers and philosophers posit that multiplicity…
Research has linked a student's affect to her epistemology (Boaler & Greeno, 2000), but those constructs often apply broadly to a discipline and/or classroom culture. Independently, an emerging line of research shows that a student in a…
It is well known that women are underrepresented in the academic systems of many countries. Gender discrimination is one of the factors that could contribute to this phenomenon. This study considers a recent national academic recruitment…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
The observed performance difference between women and men on assessments in physics---the "gender gap"---is a significant and persistent inequity which has broad implications for the participation of women in physics. Research also shows…