disparate treatment
What It Means
Disparate treatment occurs when an AI system deliberately treats people differently based on protected characteristics like race, gender, or age. This includes both obvious discrimination (like explicitly using race in hiring decisions) and sneaky workarounds (like using zip codes as a proxy for race when the intent is to discriminate).
Why Chief AI Officers Care
This type of discrimination violates civil rights laws and can result in massive lawsuits, regulatory penalties, and reputational damage. Unlike unintentional bias, disparate treatment involves provable intent to discriminate, making legal liability much clearer and penalties more severe.
Real-World Example
A lending AI system is programmed to automatically reject loan applications from people with names that sound African American, or it uses neighborhood demographics as a deliberate way to screen out minority applicants while appearing to use neutral criteria.
Common Confusion
People often confuse disparate treatment with disparate impact - the key difference is intent. Disparate treatment is intentional discrimination, while disparate impact is when a neutral policy accidentally harms protected groups.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare AI, disparate treatment occurs when algorithms explicitly or implicitly use protected characteristics to m...
Finance: In finance, disparate treatment occurs when AI systems intentionally discriminate against protected classes in lending, ...
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- 6 industry-specific applications
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- Real compliance scenarios
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Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"Intentional discrimination, including (i) decisions explicitly based on protected characteristics; and (ii) intentional discrimination via proxy variables (e.g literacy tests for voting eligibility)."Source: Lipton,_Zachary
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