Equity Lens: AI Guardrails for Fair Talent Selection, Recognition, and Opportunity (ONLINE)

Organizers:

Working Group on Equal Opportunities (AKC) of the German Physical Society (DPG)

Co-organizer: Sumiko Shimo (UNESCO AI Ethics without Borders, Women for Ethical AI, G20 Technical Facility, ISO/IEC SC42) 

Contributors:

Agnes Sandner, AKC

Dr. Iris Traulsen, AIP Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam

Description

Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping decisions about careers, recognition, funding, and professional advancement. This interactive co-creation workshop introduces Equity Lens - a prototype transparency tool designed to help organizations make selection processes more evidence-based and reflective.

Rather than automating or replacing human judgement, Equity Lens provides privacy-preserving, aggregated indicators of potential structural bias - including familiarity bias, institutional concentration, gender disparity, network effects, and career-stage imbalance - before committees reach their final decisions. The tool enables decision-makers to identify patterns that might otherwise remain invisible, supporting informed reflection while maintaining full human responsibility.

The workshop centers on co-creation: participants will actively contribute to defining requirements, governance principles, and design priorities for an open-source version of Equity Lens. Through a live demonstration, structured discussions, and collaborative design exercises, the workshop will generate a tangible requirements specification that reflects the needs and values of diverse stakeholders and guides future development.

Resources

AKC’s written contribution to the UN Global Dialogue on AI: https://www.un.org/global-dialogue-ai-governance/en/inputs

UNESCO Women for Ethical AI: outlook study on artificial intelligence and gender - UNESCO Digital Library

Risks of Bias in AI-Based Emotional Analysis Technology from Diversity Perspectives https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9462168

AI Hiring Tools Can Yield Racial Bias and Systemic Rejection https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-hiring-tools-can-yield-racial-bias-and-systemic-rejection