CAREER: Skin Color and Inequality: Measurement and Mitigation

Skin color discrimination, regardless of race, is common across societies around the world. Also known as colorism, it typically manifests itself in favoring lighter skin over darker skin and has been found to be an important predictor of many outcomes, including occupation, educational attainment, criminal justice system involvement, and marital outcomes, among others. However, there is no objective way of measuring skin color. This CAREER award will fund research to develop new methods, based on artificial intelligence technology, to accurately measure skin tone, for a large number of young people and make the data available to other researchers. This will allow more research on the relationship between skin tone and several outcomes. The research will also use the data to investigate how skin tone affects who is chosen to participate in crime intervention programs as well as parental investments in their children’s education. The results of this research will provide inputs into efforts to reduce differential opportunities based in skin tone differences. This will improve the overall quality of the US labor force, increase productivity, economic growth, and improve the well-being of citizens. The results of this research will also help establish the US as a global leader in reducing the effects of colorism on outcomes. Despite the potential distortionary effects on decision-making, colorism has been understudied in the economics literature, partly because it is difficult to measure colorism. The first part of this CAREER research award will develop AI and neural networks assisted computational protocols to systematically classify skin color that is scalable, replicable, accounts for local knowledge in a study setting, and use the protocols to create a large data set on skin color. The methods and data collected will open new avenues of inquiry across the social sciences, medicine, humanities, and law. The research project will also study how individual-level interventions, such as those related to education and other human capital investments, and empowerment programs, may be causally influenced by colorism. This part of this research will also study the heterogeneous impacts of interventions based on skin color, as well as explore potential underlying mechanisms that contribute to these differential effects. The results of this research will provide inputs into efforts to reduce differential opportunities to people based on skin color; efforts that are likely to improve the overall quality of the US labor force, increase productivity, economics growth, and the well-being of American citizens. The results of this research will also help establish the US as the global leader in reducing the effects of colorism on many outcomes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.