underrepresentation
What It Means
Underrepresentation occurs when certain demographic groups make up a smaller percentage of your workforce, leadership, or customer base than they do in the broader population or relevant talent pool. It's essentially a numbers game - if 30% of computer science graduates are women but only 15% of your AI engineering team is women, you have underrepresentation. This gap between availability and actual participation signals potential barriers in your hiring, promotion, or retention processes.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
Underrepresented teams build AI systems that reflect their limited perspectives, leading to biased algorithms that perform poorly for underserved populations and create legal liability. Companies with underrepresented AI teams miss market opportunities, face regulatory scrutiny, and struggle with talent retention as top candidates increasingly evaluate diversity when choosing employers. The business risk is compounded because AI systems amplify and automate these biases at scale across your entire customer base.
Real-World Example
A facial recognition system developed by a team that was 85% male and 90% white performed significantly worse at identifying women and people with darker skin tones, leading to customer complaints, media backlash, and eventual product recalls. The company discovered that their hiring practices had created an AI development team that didn't reflect their diverse global customer base, resulting in a product that literally couldn't see their customers clearly.
Common Confusion
People often confuse underrepresentation with quotas or assume it means lowering standards to hit specific numbers. Actually, underrepresentation analysis reveals whether your current processes are effectively accessing the full talent pool and identifies systemic barriers that may be screening out qualified candidates before they even apply.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare, underrepresentation critically impacts both workforce diversity and patient outcomes, as homogeneous team...
Finance: In finance, underrepresentation manifests when demographic groups are disproportionately absent from trading floors, inv...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"inadequately represented. (See note.)"Source: Merriam-Webster_underrepresented
"when members of discernible groups are not consistently present in representative bodies and among measures of well-being in numbers roughly proportionate to their numbers within the population. "Source: Encyclopedia.com_underrepresentation
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