A Study of Pre-processing Fairness Intervention Methods for Ranking People

Fairness interventions are hard to use in practice when ranking people due to legal constraints that limit access to sensitive information. Pre-processing fairness interventions, however, can be used in practice to create more fair training data that encourage the model to generate fair predictions without having access to sensitive information during inference. Little is known about the performance of pre-processing fairness interventions in a recruitment setting. To simulate a real scenario, we train a ranking model on pre-processed representations, while access to sensitive information is limited during inference. We evaluate pre-processing fairness intervention methods in terms of individual fairness and group fairness. On two real-world datasets, the pre-processing methods are found to improve the diversity of rankings with respect to gender, while individual fairness is not affected. Moreover, we discuss advantages and disadvantages of using pre-processing fairness interventions in practice for ranking people.