#bias and discrimination

[nahidaahmed393]

Ethics in AI: Addressing Bias and Discrimination in Algorithms-course

If you want this product, click on this link. Thank you

[tobeabatman]

there’s this kind of a trend where thin people are like ”yes, fat people should be represented in art but only if we don’t promote fatness and say it’s okay for people to stay fat!”

And it’s like, bro, I don’t care if you make art of fat people if your underlying message is that I still need to go through weight-loss to completely change my body. I have the right to my body as is.

I don’t feel represented or accepted if your representation comes with terms and conditions.

Create more fat characters and art but not because you see the potential of us becoming thin!

[unbfacts]

Studies reveal that a defendant's physical appearance can influence sentencing outcomes. Unattractive individuals may receive sentences up to three times longer than attractive ones, despite similar offenses.

[itellmyselfsecrets]

“Several studies conducted over the past decade or so show that letters of recommendation are another seemingly gender-neutral part of a hiring process that is in fact anything but. One U.S. study found that female candidates are described with more communal (warm; kind; nurturing) and less active (ambitious; self-confident) language than men. And having communal characteristics included in your letter of recommendation makes it less likely that you will get the job, particularly if you're a woman: while 'team-player' is taken as a leadership quality in men, for women the term ‘can make a woman seem like a follower’”. - Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)

[pinkcarsupremacy]

Thinking about how after this everyone will still act like Ocon is a driver who can't stay on track lmao

[a-little-revolution]

hey Elliot! I'm CO writing a zine on appearance biases, and I'm writing the section on disability. if you had any thoughts is love to hear them

Hello!! I love Zines that's splendid!!

Gosh there's so much to say on appearance bias when it comes to disability - it is the first thing people notice about me, and sometime all that they see.

So many assumptions come with being disabled - that I'm something to be pitied, that I require unsolicited help, that I can't take care of myself, that I'm childlike, that I'm loveless, and more.

How I dress and present myself directly effects the way people see my disability - it's the make or break between me being seen as self sufficient and capable or lazy and debilitated.

I must always come across as charismatic and approachable if I want strangers to treat me well - before they even know me I must counteract their ableism.

Past my queerness, past my gender, my disability enters the room first.

My fatness it met with the assumption that somehow my disability is my doing - rather than being a symptom of chronic pain.

Being a little person (with Achondroplasia dwarifsm) comes with it's own flavour of bias. There is a layer of ableism that comes with dwarfism - a mockery and grotesque curiosity that I must beat off with a stick. My disabled experience gets morphed into being ugly and humorous.

I am not expected to have a community unless they are caregivers. My partner and friends have been mistaken for handlers and employees countless times - the thought that I would be loved for free is not first nature under ableism.

Whether I am alone or with friends is night and day when it comes to my treatment by strangers - it's a sort of strange second hand humanization.

Gosh there's so much more, I could write a book on it! (lol I am in fact). If you'd like to talk more directly on the subject let me know!

Elliot (they/them)

[nonbinannytranny]

This was a comment I wrote but it honestly deserves its own post. right now we need energy to fight and not burn out more than anything.

Please give it a quick read.

Lead with grace and example and remember we ALL have unlearning to do. I’ve been working at this for years and every day I’m still learning and I am so fucking grateful when something new is discovered to me. It’s beautiful, and capitalism cannot take critical thought away from you but it can keep it from you.

[reading-writing-revolution]

(via ‘Extremely disturbing and unethical’: new rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans | Trump administration | The Guardian)

In making the changes, VA officials cite the president’s 30 January executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”. The primary purpose of the executive order was to strip most government protections from transgender people. The VA has since ceased providing most gender-affirming care and forbidden a long list of words, including “gender affirming” and “transgender”, from clinical settings.

Medical experts said the implications of rule changes uncovered by the Guardian could be far-reaching.

They “seem to open the door to discrimination on the basis of anything that is not legally protected”, said Dr Kenneth Kizer, the VA’s top healthcare official during the Clinton administration. He said the changes open up the possibility that doctors could refuse to treat veterans based on their “reason for seeking care – including allegations of rape and sexual assault – current or past political party affiliation or political activity, and personal behavior such as alcohol or marijuana use”.

[tobeabatman]

”Fat activists think fat people are discriminated against and that’s ridiculous” is something along the lines of what I read today.

And it’s like, that drives me up the wall. Because it establishes two things: first of all, fat activists are a singular unit, and that the person who posted the post has more knowledge on discrimination than fat activists could possibly have (basically that we’re white cishet non-disabled peeps who don’t know anything about discrimination and want to pretend we’re oppressed).

Personally, coming to the realization that fat people are oppressed was a long process. I went through a lot of arguments with myself, and I didn’t look at fat activism content at all back then. And guess what? Even if you believe fat activism is an echo chamber, I was personally still able to come to the conclusion that fat people are oppressed after a long time of associating myself with marginalized groups, because I felt like my body made me a subhuman in the eyes of others, and because I saw other fat people get treated the same trashy way as me. Not because I saw another fat person decide that what we experience is oppression.

And even before I had come to the realization that fat people are oppressed, I still recognized that fat people are treated worse in our society. Just calling it oppression was what I had to put a pin down on.

And it’s like, oppression isn’t really even something that has a strict definition, it’s more-so recognized that a group of humans get treated worse in our society, because forms of oppression have similar experiences but not all of them. If you’re going to start listing off ways other marginalized identities get treated worse in our society, a fat person will be able to point out that they experience a ton of the same things. Read On Fat Oppression by G. M. Miller, it’s free to read online.

Another thing I’d like to note is that a lot of fat people are marginalized in other ways and still recognize they are oppressed for being fat. Did the person want to imply that fat people who are a part of other marginalized identities don’t know what oppression or discrimination are? Ugh.

Usually I don’t see people say that fat people are not oppressed outright, but to this person: if basing your whole blog on ”being fat is okay but fat people aren’t oppressed and should lose weight ASAP. Also fat activists are terrible people who try to make being unhealthy okay” is what makes you sleep at night then do sleep on it, but like also restricting where the line of oppression ends at and dedicating your whole blog to that idea is not a cool thing. Also the whole ”fat activists try to make becoming unhealthy okay” is just weird to me, because I can promise you that person is probably pro-disability rights while at the same time hating fat activists for ”making being unhealthy okay”.

also like other forms of oppression, fatphobia also affects those who aren’t fat (less, but still). Like look me in the eyes and tell me that fat activists aren’t doing everyone a justice by trying to get rid of the dieting culture and the beauty standards that hurt us all but some more.

[raffaellopalandri]

Book of the Day – Invisible Women

Today’s Book of the Day is Invisible Women, written by Caroline Criado Pérez in 2019 and published by Abrams Press. Caroline Criado Pérez is a British writer, journalist, and activist known for her rigorous research and commitment to gender equality. She gained prominence through campaigns such as the fight to keep a woman’s image on British banknotes and the push for a statue of suffragist…

[ethics-and-ink]

Read More Here: Substack

[transsolidarity]

We all have to start somewhere – most people are born wanting to be kind and compassionate, but it takes work to undo the underlying negativity we’re taught. Here are some basic concepts to read about, regardless of where you are in your allyship and social justice journey.

Read the full article and support the blog:

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Steve Stewart-Williams

Published: Mar 5, 2025

Do teachers exhibit gender bias when grading students’ work? If so, in which direction does the bias go? Are teachers more likely to favor boys or favor girls?

These are the questions explored in a fascinating 2020 paper by Camille Terrier, published in the Economics of Education Review. Terrier compared children’s marks on gender-blind national exams with non-blind marks given by their teachers. The findings revealed a persistent marking bias in favor of girls. Although the effect wasn’t huge, Terrier found persuasive evidence that the bias contributes to boys falling behind in school.

Below are some excerpts from the paper. You can read the whole thing here for free.

Background

Boys are increasingly falling behind girls at school. This disadvantage has important consequences: boys who fall behind are at risk of dropping out of school, not attending college or university, and/or being unemployed. In OECD countries, 66% of women entered a university program in 2009, versus 52% of men, and this gap is increasing. In Europe, 43% of women aged 30–34 completed tertiary education in 2015, compared to 34% of men in the same age range. Because this gap has increased by 4.4 percentage points in the last ten years, there is a growing interest in identifying its roots.

Method

I use a rich student-level dataset… that follows 4490 pupils from grade 6 until grade 11. To quantify teachers’ gender biases in math and French, I exploit an essential feature of the data: it contains both blind and non-blind scores. An external grader without knowledge of student’s characteristics provides schools with blind scores. These scores are presumably free of teachers’ biases. Teachers provide non-blind scores for in-class exams… This data allows me to study the effect of teachers’ gender biases on pupils’ progress, schools attended, and course choices.

Quantifying Teacher Bias

[D]espite the commonly held belief that girls are discriminated against, teacher biases favor girls… Figs. 1 and 2 display the distributions of blind and non-blind French scores at the beginning of grade 6… [G]irls’ average score is 0.434 points higher than boys when the score is blind and 0.460 when it is non-blind.

[ Figs. 1 & 2. Test scores for each sex are standardized such that 0 represents the average score. ]

[T]he story is different in mathematics. Figs. 3 and 4 show that boys outperform girls when grades are blind, but the opposite is true when teachers assess their own pupils: girls’ average score at the beginning of grade 6 is 0.147 points lower than boys when the score is blind, but it is 0.170 points higher when the score is non-blind.

[ Figs 3 & 4. Test scores for each sex are standardized such that 0 represents the average score. ]

Knock-On Effects of Teacher Bias

This favoritism, estimated as individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts… For two classes where the achievement gap between boys and girls would be identical in 6th grade, quasi-randomly assigning a teacher who is 1 SD more biased against boys to one of the classes decreases boys’ progress in that class relative to girls by 0.123 SD in math and by 0.106 SD in French. Over the four years of middle school, teachers’ gender bias against boys accounts for 6% of boys falling behind girls in math… Moving to other outcomes, I find that having a teacher who is one SD more biased in math increases girls’ probability of selecting a scientific track in high school by 3.6 percentage points compared to boys’. Teachers’ average bias in math reduces the gender gap in choosing scientific courses by 12.5%… If teachers’ biases are mainly driven by statistical discrimination, we might expect end-of-year grades to be less biased (and the variance to be smaller) because teachers acquire information about students during the year. On the other hand, if teachers’ biases are mainly taste based, bias should not change over time.1 In that case, end-of-year in-class grades should produce similar bias variance than first-semester grades. The mean and variance of the bias are very similar at the beginning of the year and at the end, suggesting that gender favoritism is mainly taste based.

--

Abstract

I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls in their evaluations. This favoritism, estimated as individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school. Without teachers’ bias in favor of girls, the gender gap in choosing a science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys.

==

That is, biased marking puts individuals on a science track who would otherwise not qualify, while removing individuals who otherwise would qualify. This is the same situation as Affirmative Action, which artificially altered the natural/unbiased class composition, and which was struck down as unconstitutional.

Some years ago, the very accurate point was made that mean intelligence between males and female is the same, so there's no reason to think girls are any less capable than boys.

Now that the education gender gap has inverted, a common excuse for doing nothing is that, "girls are just smarter than boys." That is, we've pivoted from "all disparities are discrimination" to "these disparities are not just normal but good, ackshully," and we're being gaslighted to pretend we forgot that mean intelligence is the same, even though we've known for years that sex discrimination by teachers is a real thing.

[tobeabatman]

I personally don’t really like the implications some people make that fatphobia only exists because of capitalism

Like in conversations about fatphobia someone will just come in and say fatphobia benefits corporations and imply that without the capitalization of weight-loss and the creation of diet culture, there wouldn’t be fatphobia. Maybe not that fatphobia would be fully gone without capitalism, but it swifts the conversation just enough to the wrong direction where we now suddenly are talking about weight loss industry in general and not specifically oppression towards fat people.

The capitalization of weight-loss and fitness and wellness are obviously linked to fatphobia, and fatphobia has gotten much worse because of it. But I don’t think it’s right to imply that’s the only reason fatphobia exists

First of all it ignores the very important origin history between racism/eugenics, and fatphobia. Second of all it makes fatphobia seem more like a result of corporate greed and shifts the blame to faceless corporations while ignoring the human bias side of why fatphobia exists.

And like the point here isn’t that we shouldn’t bring up the fact that capitalism benefits of fatphobia. But it shouldn’t be made to seem like the biggest reason or the only reason why fatphobia exists. The takes are usually meant well but they usually seem like they are written by thin people who don’t really know how to contribute to the conversation otherwise, so they just talk about the only safe topic they can think of, which is diet culture and its capitalization.

For all I know it could also be fat activists writing these takes, but there’s a time and place for talking about the capitalization of weight-loss, and the time and place isn’t just any discussion on fatphobia. Though it is also an important thing to talk about if we are very clear about the fact that capitalism didn’t just create fatphobia.