ABLEIST: Intersectional Disability Bias in LLM-Generated Hiring Scenarios

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Phutane, Mahika, Jung, Hayoung, Kim, Matthew, Mitra, Tanushree, Vashistha, Aditya
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Phutane, Mahika
Jung, Hayoung
Kim, Matthew
Mitra, Tanushree
Vashistha, Aditya
author_facet Phutane, Mahika
Jung, Hayoung
Kim, Matthew
Mitra, Tanushree
Vashistha, Aditya
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly under scrutiny for perpetuating identity-based discrimination in high-stakes domains such as hiring, particularly against people with disabilities (PwD). However, existing research remains largely Western-centric, overlooking how intersecting forms of marginalization--such as gender and caste--shape experiences of PwD in the Global South. We conduct a comprehensive audit of six LLMs across 2,820 hiring scenarios spanning diverse disability, gender, nationality, and caste profiles. To capture subtle intersectional harms and biases, we introduce ABLEIST (Ableism, Inspiration, Superhumanization, and Tokenism), a set of five ableism-specific and three intersectional harm metrics grounded in disability studies literature. Our results reveal significant increases in ABLEIST harms towards disabled candidates--harms that many state-of-the-art models failed to detect. These harms were further amplified by sharp increases in intersectional harms (e.g., Tokenism) for gender and caste-marginalized disabled candidates, highlighting critical blind spots in current safety tools and the need for intersectional safety evaluations of frontier models in high-stakes domains like hiring.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_10998
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ABLEIST: Intersectional Disability Bias in LLM-Generated Hiring Scenarios
Phutane, Mahika
Jung, Hayoung
Kim, Matthew
Mitra, Tanushree
Vashistha, Aditya
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly under scrutiny for perpetuating identity-based discrimination in high-stakes domains such as hiring, particularly against people with disabilities (PwD). However, existing research remains largely Western-centric, overlooking how intersecting forms of marginalization--such as gender and caste--shape experiences of PwD in the Global South. We conduct a comprehensive audit of six LLMs across 2,820 hiring scenarios spanning diverse disability, gender, nationality, and caste profiles. To capture subtle intersectional harms and biases, we introduce ABLEIST (Ableism, Inspiration, Superhumanization, and Tokenism), a set of five ableism-specific and three intersectional harm metrics grounded in disability studies literature. Our results reveal significant increases in ABLEIST harms towards disabled candidates--harms that many state-of-the-art models failed to detect. These harms were further amplified by sharp increases in intersectional harms (e.g., Tokenism) for gender and caste-marginalized disabled candidates, highlighting critical blind spots in current safety tools and the need for intersectional safety evaluations of frontier models in high-stakes domains like hiring.
title ABLEIST: Intersectional Disability Bias in LLM-Generated Hiring Scenarios
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10998