Definition
Bias audit
An assessment of whether a hiring tool produces different selection rates across protected groups, performed by a party independent of the tool’s vendor.
Last reviewed
In practice
Independence is the load-bearing word. A vendor testing its own tool and publishing a favourable result has produced marketing, not an audit, and regulations that require audits generally say so explicitly.
A standard audit computes selection rates by sex and by race or ethnicity, and the intersection of the two, then reports the impact ratios. It describes outcomes; it does not certify that a tool is fair, because a tool can produce equal selection rates while measuring the wrong thing entirely.
The most common practical obstacle is data. An employer that never collected voluntary demographic data has nothing to audit, and assembling it retrospectively under time pressure is how audits end up superficial.
Not to be confused with
- A fairness guarantee
- An audit reports what happened to selection rates in a period. It says nothing about whether the tool measures something job-related, and a passing audit is not a defence against a claim that it does not.
Related
Adverse impact
A substantially different rate of selection for a protected group resulting from a neutral-seeming employment practice, whether or not anyone intended it.
Automated employment decision tool
A computational process that substantially assists or replaces discretionary hiring decisions, typically by scoring, ranking or filtering candidates.
Selection rate
The proportion of candidates from a given group who pass a particular stage of a hiring process.
Read further
Longer pieces on this and the arguments around it.
What an AI bias audit actually measures
A bias audit is an outcome analysis, not a code review. What impact ratios are, what an audit cannot tell you, and how to read a summary you have been handed.
ReadNYC Local Law 144: a practical compliance checklist
Local Law 144 requires an annual independent bias audit, a published summary, and advance notice to candidates. What each obligation means operationally.
Read