# Closing the Gender Wage Gap: Adversarial Fairness in Job Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.09592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [Learning Adversarially Fair and Transferable Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06309/) (2018)
- [Measuring Bias in Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07337/) (2019)
- [Lipstick on a Pig: Debiasing Methods Cover up Systematic Gender Biases in Word Embeddings But do not Remove Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03862/) (2019)
- [Censoring Representations with an Adversary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05897/) (2015)
- [Data Decisions and Theoretical Implications when Adversarially Learning Fair Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00075/) (2017)
- [It's All in the Name: Mitigating Gender Bias with Name-Based Counterfactual Data Substitution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00871/) (2019)
- [FairRec: Fairness-aware News Recommendation with Decomposed Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16742/) (2020)
- [Does Robustness Improve Fairness? Approaching Fairness with Word Substitution Robustness Methods for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10826/) (2021)
- [Responsible team players wanted: an analysis of soft skill requirements in job advertisements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07781/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [A Survey on Fairness-aware Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00403/) (2023)
- [Measuring Bias in a Ranked List using Term-based Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05975/) (2024)
- [Unmasking Gender Bias in Recommendation Systems and Enhancing Category-Aware Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17921/) (2025)
- [Consumer-side Fairness in Recommender Systems: A Systematic Survey of Methods and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09330/) (2023)
- [Applications of Risk Science to AI Fairness Evaluation: Principles, Challenges, and Best Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29478/) (2026)
- [Advancing Fairness in Natural Language Processing: From Traditional Methods to Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12511/) (2024)
- [FnRGNN: Distribution-aware Fairness in Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19257/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of this work is to help mitigate the already existing gender wage gap by supplying unbiased job recommendations based on resumes from job seekers. We employ a generative adversarial network to remove gender bias from word2vec representations of 12M job vacancy texts and 900k resumes. Our results show that representations created from recruitment texts contain algorithmic bias and that this bias results in real-world consequences for recommendation systems. Without controlling for bias, women are recommended jobs with significantly lower salary in our data. With adversarially fair representations, this wage gap disappears, meaning that our debiased job recommendations reduce wage discrimination. We conclude that adversarial debiasing of word representations can increase real-world fairness of systems and thus may be part of the solution for creating fairness-aware recommendation systems.