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If the bank does not take race or gender into its decision-making process, it is not subject to race/gender discrimination. Period. If the outcome produced is that people of a certain race or gender receive more or less loans, that does not mean that there is anything wrong with that system. The banks isolated system is not at all discriminatory, it just receives different inputs that happen to differ, on average, between population groups.

If you're concerned for the capability of a given arbitrary population group to have a different outcome, then the goal posts need to necessarily be moved back. Why did that population have lower credit score, lower income, lower wealth? Historical racism? That certainly has some role, but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the present system is itself racially biased. Is it the code or is it the data?

Regarding your anecdata, consider an interesting thing I saw recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk3tVSJSkQM

This was meant to highlight injustice, but really just shows how differently people can interpret the exact same events occurring to them on the basis of their preconceptions.




I mean, this is kinda the point.

No matter what you do, you'll be discriminatory (to a very high likelihood). Even if you don't look at the break-downs of your data, you will be discriminating against some group or another. It is incredibly unlikely that you can max/min two curves at once, let alone for all the classes, races, sexes, castes, genders, etc. that exist.

I agree that root causes should be addressed first and is the best use of time and resources. However, that's not how journalists see it. They see a red-meat story and they go with it.

Federal investigators, journalists, community organizers, etc don't really care what metrics the banks are using/not-using, they care about the results. And I'm saying that there will very nearly always be discrimination if you use nearly any metric. And that's not a bad thing. Being in a Catch-22 is part of life. Trying to get out of one is the thing that matters.




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