  Implicit bias is the unconscious attribution of particular qualities (or lack
thereof) to a member from a particular social group (e.g., defined by gender or
race). Studies on implicit bias have shown that these unconscious stereotypes
can have adverse outcomes in various social contexts, such as job screening,
teaching, or policing. Recently, (Kleinberg and Raghavan, 2018) considered a
mathematical model for implicit bias and showed the effectiveness of the Rooney
Rule as a constraint to improve the utility of the outcome for certain cases of
the subset selection problem. Here we study the problem of designing
interventions for the generalization of subset selection -- ranking -- that
requires to output an ordered set and is a central primitive in various social
and computational contexts. We present a family of simple and interpretable
constraints and show that they can optimally mitigate implicit bias for a
generalization of the model studied in (Kleinberg and Raghavan, 2018).
Subsequently, we prove that under natural distributional assumptions on the
utilities of items, simple, Rooney Rule-like, constraints can also surprisingly
recover almost all the utility lost due to implicit biases. Finally, we augment
our theoretical results with empirical findings on real-world distributions
from the IIT-JEE (2009) dataset and the Semantic Scholar Research corpus.
