Racial Bias in Data: Pausing to Listen and Act

We’re hitting pause this week, as we listen and take in the events around us.

At Enolytics we’re aware of racial bias at every step of the data + wine process and the mistakes, including our own, that can result. We’re actively listening to the broader conversation happening across data science around bias and ethics, with a particular focus on race and gender bias.

Let me quote Jennifer Lewis Priestley PhD, a colleague and friend who is particularly active in this space, from her article called “Ethics and Figs: Why Data Scientists Cannot Take Shortcuts”:

If the data selected to develop and train the algorithm come from a homogeneous subset of the population, but the results are intended to be applied to a diverse population, classification accuracy for groups not included in the original training set will always be worse.

It’s a reality of technology that reverberates into the data + wine world too. We’re working to do better. We also support the work of organizations (like Women in Technology which, like Enolytics, is based in Atlanta) that increase the diversity of analysts and programmers.

We continue to listen and evolve.

Thank you, as always, for reading.