Debiasing Embeddings for Reduced Gender Bias in Text Classification

We investigate how this bias affects downstream classification tasks, using the case study of occupation classification (De-Arteaga et al., 2019). We show that traditional techniques for debiasing embeddings can actually worsen the bias of the downstream classifier by providing a less noisy channel for communicating gender information. With a relatively minor adjustment, however, we show how these same techniques can be used to simultaneously reduce bias and maintain high classification accuracy.