Red Flag 5. Algorithmic decision-making that can result in discrimination

Algorithmic decision-making that can affect access to rights & resources /

Using or providing algorithmic systems that make predictions, recommendations or decisions that can affect people’s access to rights and resources.
For Example /
  • Banks, insurance firms and mortgage companies using automated decision-making that results in individuals being declined credit based on their age or race
  • Recruitment companies using algorithmic systems to help employers make decisions about candidates in ways that result in certain groups such as women and ethnic minorities being disproportionality removed from recruitment processes
  • Companies offering algorithmic tools and solutions to public institutions that make decisions about:
  • Law enforcement (e.g., for use in predicting crimes based on ethnicity)
  • Immigration (e.g., for use in group profiling and prediction used in detention, deportation or onitoring decision-making)
  • Social scoring systems (e.g., for use in determining access to services, benefits or opportunities)
  • Social media companies selling profiling and targeting services that enable political campaigners to spread misinformation about opponents or election dates in ways that undermine the ability of individuals to participate in political processes without interference
Higher-Risk Sectors /
  • Companies that offer or make use of targeted advertising such as social media, search, websites, blogs, as well as advertisers and their media agencies
  • Consumer finance and credit
  • Health insurance and healthcare
  • Retailers when targeting customers with product promotions
  • Recruitment industry including online portals and software providers
  • IT and technology companies selling algorithmic solutions to government agencies including healthcare and the criminal justice system
  • Political consulting firms
  • Data brokers selling data analytics as a service
Download Red Flag 5

Questions for Leaders /

  • Do we have evidence that algorithmic profiling delivers notably greater benefits than more traditional tools for decision-making? Have we done an expert review of whether it may lead to us excluding certain groups?
  • Do we have in place the necessary technical know-how and oversight to:
  • Design, build and deploy algorithmic tools in ways that minimize discriminatory and other risks?
  • Responsibly evaluate, procure and use algorithmic tools?
  • If challenged, are we prepared to explain the decisions we make using these tools? Can we evidence that we are not negatively impacting people’s right to non-discrimination, privacy and other rights?

Understanding Risks
and Opportunities /

Right to non-discrimination and associated impacts on economic, social and cultural rights, such as housing, employment opportunities, livelihoods and healthcare. The use of algorithms to automate decision-making in industries as diverse as online advertising, recruitment, healthcare, retail, and consumer finance is rarely – if ever – intended to undermine individuals’ right to non- discrimination. In fact, these tools have the potential to reduce or remove human bias from decision-making. Nonetheless, the opposite can also be true. Examples include:

  • Social media, search and websites selling targeted advertising where:
    • Landlords have been enabled to exclude users based on race, age or gender. This has occurred when tools allowed agents to explicitly exclude certain groups from seeing housing ads. It can also happen in more subtle ways when companies allow targeting based on categories, such as age, marital status, and ZIP code, that are de facto proxies for certain groups. A series of court cases have led to many companies, including Facebook, committing to change their policies.
    • Ads for jobs placed on search platforms result in higher paying jobs being shown to more men than women, as in a 2015 case involving Google, reported in the Washington Post. Google has since taken steps to seek to address these, and similar examples, by updating its ad targeting policies.
    • Elderly populations have been targeted with fraudulent products or services to trick them out of cash or savings, ranging from anti-ageing products to funeral insurance and reverse mortgages. In one case, retired, politically conservative individuals in the United States were tricked into using much of their retirement savings to buy marked up gold and silver coins to “protect their money from the deep state.” Even though this broke the company’s rules, Facebook showed ads supporting this scheme more than 45 million times over a 21-month period.
  • Discrimination in credit and insurance decision-making, for example:
    • Where loan providers rely on algorithms to analyze credit worthiness. In 2020, a report from the US-based Student Borrower Protection Center found that two lending institutions were effectively raising the cost of credit for students at academic institutions serving predominantly Hispanic and Black students.
    • Where insurance companies use algorithms to set the price of cover. 2018 reports alleged that UK car insurance firms were using algorithms that quoted higher premiums to people with non-Western names. The International Association of Insurance Providers published a paper cautioning the industry about these risks.
    • Where individuals’ credit limits are influenced by their social connections. Some companies are requesting mobile phone data and social media records in order to make judgements about credit worthiness. Where individuals’ do not have a credit history this can be one way to positively increase financial inclusion. But is also risks bringing down minorities’ scores if, for example, an individual has friends and family members who have not paid past debts.
  • Recruitment industry tools that discriminate. The recruitment industry increasingly integrates automated decision-making as part of its value proposition to employers. In this context, discrimination can occur in a range of ways that have been well highlighted by researchers. High profile examples have included companies offering tools that:
    • Examine social media timelines and online postings about candidates with the risk that data which should not legally or ethically exclude an individual from a job – such as political opinion, sexual orientation or having family members convicted of a crime – ends up doing so.
    • Use Natural Language Processing to screen out candidate resumes that don’t fit an employer’s prior hiring patterns, which can perpetuate, racial, gender and other discrimination.
    • Allow employers conducting video interviews to grade verbal responses, tone, and facial expressions against high- performing employees potentially reinforcing biases and being unable to interpret non-white faces.
  • Discrimination in healthcare. Healthcare professionals are increasingly looking to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to achieve breakthroughs in disease detection, diagnosis and patient care plans. The WHO has begun to flag associated ethical risks. In one case, an algorithmic tool sold to hospitals and insurers to predict health care needs was found to underestimate the needs of Black patients.

Impacts on Civil and Political Rights including the right to equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of assembly, the right to information, political participation. For example:

  • Predictive Policing: In 2019, human rights organizations, journalist and academics reported that police departments in the United States and the United Kingdom were piloting private sector tools to predict crime as a means to allocate resources with discriminating effects based on race, sexuality and age.
  • Predicting Recidivism Rates in Criminal Justice: In 2016, A commercial tool developed by U.S company Northpointe to predict the likelihood of a criminal re-offending, was assessed by Pro Publica. Findings included that among other things “black defendants were far more likely than white defendants to be incorrectly judged to be at a higher risk of recidivism, while white defendants were more likely than black defendants to be incorrectly flagged as low risk.”
  • Facial Recognition: The proposition of facial recognition tools is to enable users to identify individuals by comparing their facial characteristics against a database of images. Users – such as law enforcement agencies, airports, border control and private security companies – can then act on matches where an individual has committed an offence or that they deem to be a threat. Concerns about these tools include: the risk of false positives and unfair detention (especially where they have proven to be less accurate on non-white and non-male faces), and chilling effects on freedom of assembly.
  • Political Campaigning and Disinformation: Social media companies that generate revenue by selling targeted advertising to political campaigners have come under intense scrutiny from civil society organizations making the case that this has threatened democratic processes. Of particular concern have been examples in which voters have been targeted by foreign parties with disinformation about voting dates and processes with the aim of suppressing some voters from going to the polls. Equally concerning, and spotlighted by the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal, are when political lobby or consulting firms sell micro-targeting strategies using disinformation as a service to political incumbents or opposition parties.

Impacts on the Right to Effective Remedy: Whether algorithmic profiling and predictions amount to State violations, or a business abuse of human rights, the nature of the tools described above can undermine the right to an effective remedy for violations of human rights, which is a fundamental principle of international human rights law. In her 2020 report, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia explains that, “In many cases, the data, codes and systems responsible for discriminatory and related outcomes are complex and shielded from scrutiny, including by contract and intellectual property laws. In some contexts, not even computer programmers may themselves be able to explain the way that their algorithmic systems function. This “black box” effect makes it difficult for affected groups to overcome steep evidentiary burdens of proof typically required to prove discrimination through legal proceedings, assuming that court processes are even available in the first place.”

Privacy Impacts: Where business models depend on algorithmic profiling and predictions about individuals, this can create or compound risks to the right to privacy. For example:

  • Rapidly Evolving Regulatory Risks: The development, sale and use of algorithmic profiling and decision-making tools is gaining increased attention from regulators. In the United States there have been proposals for a federal Algorithmic Accountability Act and local law makers have already passed (New York City in 2017) or are debating laws (for example, Washington State). The most notable developments have taken place in the European Union.
    • The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation addresses
      the right of individuals not to be data subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, where that decision has legal or other effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects them. In one example, a Swedish financial services company was ordered to correct its credit risk algorithm which was illegally using age as a parameter to determine credit. The EU Competition Commissioner has announced plans to further regulate this practice.”
  • Existing Legal Risk: Where algorithms are being designed and used to make traditional decisions in novel ways concerning employment, advertising and credit, existing laws apply. For example:
  • Reputational Risk, Including with Employees: The sharp increase in civil society scrutiny of algorithmic tools means that companies developing or using such tools may experience reduced trust from consumers, employees and citizens. In 2019, 250 Facebook staff members published a letter criticizing the company’s refusal to fact-check political ads and tied the issue to ad targeting.
  • Lost Investment Pre-Launch: Where companies using algorithms are found to discriminate or are deemed to be making decisions in ways that lack a social license, this can result in companies having to choose not to take these products to market. In 2018, one company had to halt the launch of a product designed to vet people for domestic services using “advanced artificial intelligence” to analyze their personalities based on social media posts, after they faced a public backlash.

*For an explanation of how companies can be involved in human rights impacts, and their related responsibilities, see here.

Companies that make decisions and pursue actions based on algorithmic profiling and predictions can cause adverse impacts on human rights. An example would be a bank denying credit based on a tool that makes discriminatory recommendations.

Companies whose value proposition is to sell the capability to profile and predict to public or private third parties can contribute to adverse human rights impacts that those actors cause where their tools embed discriminatory biases. Contribution might arise due to the ways that customers are empowered to use these tools (such as by excluding certain groups) or may be more subtle such as when an algorithmic system has bias built into the data set.

An added complexity is that a single algorithmic system may integrate a number of inputs from different actors. For example, a data broker might provide training data; an AI research firm might license an algorithm and a developer might design the customer interface. Depending on the specific circumstances, each of these companies could contribute to adverse impacts.

In situations where companies have taken reasonable steps to prevent their tools contributing to discrimination and other human rights harms, they may nevertheless be linked to adverse impacts that business or government customers are causing.

Algorithmic systems may be used to advance a number of SDGs such as those listed below. Addressing impacts to people associated with this red flag can contribute to ensuring that this is done in ways that do not simultaneously impact people’s rights to non-discrimination, privacy and physical and mental health and well-being.

SDG10: Reduce Inequality within and Among Countries.

SDG3: Healthy Lives and Well-Being for all, including by tackling disruptions to progress such as from the COVID-19 global pandemic.

SDG 5.B: Promote Empowerment of Women Through Technology

SDG11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient

The UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation is an important resource to guide “all stakeholders to play a role in advancing a safer, more equitable digital world” even as technological solutions are used to achieve the SDGs.

Taking Action /

Unless otherwise indicated, the following questions draw heavily on Ranking Digital Rights’ Best Practices: Algorithms, Machine Learning and Automated Decision-Making, and the World Economic Forum’s White Paper on How to Prevent Discriminatory Outcomes in Machine Learning.

  • Do we have a clear policy that describes how the company identifies and manages human rights risks related to the algorithmic system(s) we use?
  • Do we inform customers or users about the existence of algorithmic profiling, describe how this works, explain the variables that influence the algorithm, and explain how users and customers may be impacted?
  • Have we mapped and understood if any particular groups may be at an advantage or disadvantage in the context in which the system is being deployed? Do we have a method for checking if the output from an algorithm is decorrelated from protected or sensitive features?
  • Do we seek a diversity of views about the potential risks of proposed models, especially from specific populations affected by the outcomes of algorithmic systems we use?
  • Have we established robust diversity and inclusion policies at every level of the company, and notably in teams that develop algorithms, machine learning models, or other automated decision-making tools?
  • Have we consulted with all the relevant domain experts whose interdisciplinary insights allow us to understand potential sources of bias or unfairness, and to design ways to counteract them?
  • Do we assess whether any uses or use-cases of our algorithmic tools pose risks to human rights? Where we identify these, are we:
    • Creating clear and enforceable terms of use?
    • Engaging enterprise and government customers/users to educate and train them about how to use the tools without increasing human rights risks?
    • Do we have systems in place to monitor and review how customers are using our tools?
    • Are we clear about the actions we will take if we discover that our tools are being used in ways that lead to, or increase the likelihood of, adverse human rights impacts?
  • Do we apply “rigorous pre-release trials to ensure that algorithmic systems will not amplify biases and error due to any issues with the training data, algorithms, or other elements of system design?”
  • Have we outlined an ongoing system for evaluating fairness throughout the life cycle of our product? Do we have an escalation/emergency procedure to correct unforeseen cases of unfairness when we uncover them?
  • Are we clearly committed to only buying and/or using training datasets that comprise data whose data subjects have provided informed content to having their data included in datasets used for this purpose?
    • Are we making dataset(s) used to train machine learning models, terms of use, and APIs available to allow third parties to provide and review the behavior of our system?
    • What reporting, grievance or redress processes and recourse do we have in place? Do we have a process in place to make necessary fixes to the design of the system based on reported issues or concerns?

Mitigation examples are current or historical examples for reference, but do not offer insight into their relative maturity or effectiveness. Moreover, some examples listed below are proposals for mitigating actions that have come from data science and engineering research institutes.

  • Principles, Governance and Oversight: A number of companies in the technology industry and beyond have committed to some form of AI fairness principles as well as having ethics officers and cross-functional committees that look at these issues. One example is Microsoft’s AI, Ethics and Effects of Engineering and Research (AETHER) Committee, which operates alongside the company’s Office of Responsible AI (ORA). Microsoft states that its governance arrangements are designed to set “company-wide rules for enacting responsible AI, as well as defining roles and responsibilities for teams involved in this effort” and that “senior leadership relies on Aether to make recommendations on responsible AI issues, technologies, processes, and best practices.”
  • Tech Tools to Detect Bias: Some technology companies – including IBM, Microsoft, Google’s What-If tool and Facebook’s Fairness Flow – have developed products aimed at detecting bias in algorithmic decision-making. Such efforts can be a way to root-out bias from companies’ own profiling and predictive models as well as a way for “big tech” to mitigate the risk that third parties develop, design and deploy discriminatory algorithms using these companies’ platforms or computing power. With a similar purpose, Aequitas is an “an open source bias audit toolkit developed at the University of Chicago, [that] can be used to audit the predictions of machine learning based risk assessment tools to understand different types of biases, and make informed decisions about developing and deploying such systems.”
  • Debiasing Discrimination in Lending: Start-up Zest AI has created a feature that “uses a technique called adversarial debiasing to correct discrimination in lending models… One model predicts a borrower’s ability to pay, while the second predicts protected information, such as the race or gender of the borrower. The dueling models learn from each other through dozens of adjustments until the discrimination predictor is stumped — the race or gender variable bears no meaningful relationship to the applicant’s credit score.”
  • Data-sheets for Data Sets: Experts at Microsoft Research have proposed the idea of labelling of data sets that train algorithms similar to a nutrition labelling on foods. The intent would be to mitigate against discriminatory outcomes that occur when biased data sets are used to train algorithmic models. The idea is that this will “allow users to understand the strengths and limitations of the data that they’re using and guard against issues such as bias and overfitting.”
  • Changes to Targeted Advertising Policies: As far back as 2015, Facebook and Google banned payday loan companies from advertising on their platforms. Since 2019, Twitter, Google and Facebook have made changes to the policies and systems that allow customers to target adverts. Different changes pertain to different categories of advert including for housing and job opportunities. Of particular interest from a human rights perspective were the changes that Twitter and Google made to policies concerning political advertising made in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election. Twitter banned political ads outright in October 2019. Google limits targeting advertising in certain broad categories such as sex, gender and postcode (as against micro-targeting). The exact impact of these moves, including from a human rights perspective, is still being explored.
  • LinkedIn Fairness Tool Kit: Linked-In has developed LiFT an open-source project that detects, measures, and mitigates biases in training data sets and algorithms. The company has been using the tool itself to “compute the fairness metrics of training datasets on its platforms, such as the Job Search model.”
  • Ideal’s Reduce-Bias Guidance and tool to Reduce Bias: The recruitment services firm Ideal published a Workplace Diversity Through Recruitment: A Step-By-Step Guide and has a tool that customers can use to test and monitor for adverse impacts in its candidate grading system. Customers who collect demographic data during the course of their hiring process, can ask Ideal to instruct its algorithms to both ignore those demographics and test for and remove adverse impacts based on, among other things, compliance with the US Department of Labor’s affirmative action program, Canada’s equity programs for designated groups, and the European Union’s hiring discrimination laws.

Citation of research papers and other resources does not constitute an endorsement by Shift of their conclusions.

Dr. Christine Chow /

Board Member

She/Her

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Dr. Christine Chow has more than 25 years’ experience in investment management spanning sustainable investment, corporate governance, technology and AI.

She has held senior leadership roles at UBS Asset Management, HSBC Asset Management and Federated Hermes, where she led global stewardship, thematic research, responsible investment and engagement with companies on sustainability and governance issues. She was the human rights engagement lead at Federated Hermes, where she pioneered its approach to global value chain engagement with electronics companies, and advocated for provenance and traceability of critical minerals.

Christine served as Managing Director at UBS Asset Management, leading on global stewardship, thematic research and impact engagement. Previously, she was Global Head of Stewardship and a board member of HSBC Asset Management UK Limited, and Head of Asia and Global Technology at Federated Hermes EOS. From 2019 to 2025, she served as a board member and then Chair of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN), a global investor-led organisation representing around US$100 trillion in assets under management across more than 40 countries.

Christine is recognised internationally for her work on responsible investment, AI governance and corporate stewardship. She has published influential work on responsible AI and data governance and was a member of the UK Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence, serving on its Data Governance Task Force. She is the Appointed Advisor of AFRC in Hong Kong, the independent regulator of the accounting profession, and Emeritus Governor of the London School of Economics. Her PhD research on responsible investment was shortlisted for a United Nations award recognising industry relevance and academic excellence.

David Vermijs /

Director

He/Him Amsterdam

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As Director, David engages with business partners to better identify, prioritize and act on salient human rights issues, embedding the UN Guiding Principles in companies’ decision-making processes.

Specializes in Business Enterprises

As Director, David engages with business partners to better identify, prioritize and act on salient human rights issues, embedding the UN Guiding Principles in companies’ decision-making processes.

David has over a decade of experience advising multinational corporations, governments, NGOs and others on business and human rights. Prior to joining Shift, David provided research assistance to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for business and human rights John Ruggie. As part of his contributions, David field-tested human rights due diligence with a group of Dutch companies and their stakeholders, and he supported research on company-led grievance mechanisms.

From 2008 to 2010, David was the lead consultant on an 18-month project, the Business and Human Rights Initiative, under the umbrella of the Global Compact Network Netherlands. The initiative was a collaboration between 10 Dutch multinationals – ABN AMRO, AkzoNobel, Essent, KLM, Philips, Rabobank, Randstad, Shell, TNT and Unilever – and led to the publication of a ground-breaking business guidance tool, How to Do Business with Respect for Human Rights, in 2010. Through his work at Shift, David led the update of this publication from 2014 to 2016 with the support of the Dutch government under their National Action Plan on implementing the Guiding Principles.

Another major guidance tool David has helped develop addresses due diligence on child labor, published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Organisation of Employers (IOE) in 2015. The guidance was the result of a multi-year, multi-stakeholder, multi-country project led by David involving the ILO, IOE, companies, unions, NGOs and other stakeholders.

David was previously a Research Fellow at the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, including assisting in teaching on business and human rights, global governance, corporate governance and leadership. David sits in a personal capacity on the board of the Dutch Social and Economic Council International Corporate Social Responsibility Committee. He has a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a Bachelor of Arts in Business from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. David is a Dutch national, speaks English and Dutch and is proficient in Spanish and German.

Anna Triponel /

Senior Associate

She/Her London

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As a Senior Associate with Shift, Anna advises companies, lawyers, investors and business associations on how to put the Guiding Principles into practice.

As a Senior Associate with Shift, Anna advises companies, investors and business associations on how to put the Guiding Principles into practice. Trained as a lawyer, Anna focuses particularly on working with legal professionals on their role in implementing the Guiding Principles and has led work on analyzing regulations in various jurisdictions and how they align to the Guiding Principles. She also has particular expertise on the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework. 

Prior to joining Shift, Anna provided input to the work of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for business and human rights John Ruggie as a legal consultant. During this period, Anna also opened the New York office of the Public International Law & Policy Group, where she advised government officials, opposition leaders, human rights victims and civil society organizations on human rights, constitutional reform and transitional justice in Burma, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Somaliland, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Anna was previously a mergers and acquisitions associate at the law firm of Jones Day in New York, where she advised a broad range of multinational companies on cross-border mergers and acquisitions, joint venture, private equity and venture capital transactions. She founded and led the law firm’s International Law Pro Bono Group. She began her career as an advisor to the World Bank, advising on development governance structures to better meet the Millennium Development Goal of achieving universal primary education.

Anna is a (non-practicing) lawyer qualified in New York, England & Wales and France. She is a frequent expert speaker and writer on business and human rights and is the recipient of various professional awards, including the Empire State Counsel Award for changing the lives of those unable to afford counsel and the Seymour-Reuben Award for shaping international law. Anna has a Masters in International Law from American University Washington College of Law and a degree in common and civil law from the University of Paris X. She has been awarded the Business Sustainability Management certificate from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and the MBA Essentials certificate from London School of Economics (LSE). Anna is a British and French national and speaks English and French.

Martyn Platt /

Head of Human Resources

He/Him

As Head of Human Resources, Martyn leads Shift’s global people strategy and oversees all aspects of HR across the organization.

As Head of Human Resources, Martyn leads Shift’s global people strategy and oversees all aspects of HR across the organization. He ensures that Shift’s systems, policies and practices foster a thriving, inclusive and values-driven culture that supports our mission to embed respect for people’s dignity at the core of business practice.

Martyn brings over a decade of HR leadership experience across mission-driven and international organizations working at the intersection of business and society. Prior to joining Shift, he was Director of People Development & Culture at the PRI and earlier worked with Business in the Community. In these roles, he developed and embedded HR business partnering models, guided the organizations through significant growth and transformation, and partnered with senior leaders to design and implement people strategies that supported the delivery of their mission. Most recently, he served as a consultant with the WeProtect Global Alliance, where he supported the establishment of their HR function.

He is a Chartered Member of the CIPD and holds a Level 7 Diploma in Human Resource Management, as well as an ILM Level 7 Certificate in Executive Coaching and Mentoring, reflecting his strong focus on leadership development and coaching. Martyn studied German and International Relations at the University of Exeter, including a year at the University of Würzburg in Germany. He later worked on education projects in Nicaragua, strengthening his global outlook and commitment to people-centred change.

Martyn is based in the United Kingdom.

Brianna Peterson /

Senior Advisor

She/Her Rome

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As a Senior Advisor at Shift, Brianna advises financial institutions and companies on how to put the UNGPs into practice, with a particular focus on the nexus between human rights and climate change.

Specializes in Financial Institutions

As a Senior Advisor at Shift, Brianna advises financial institutions and companies on how to put the UNGPs into practice, with a particular focus on the nexus between human rights and climate change. Brianna combines environment and climate change expertise with experience developing and implementing human rights policies, due diligence approaches and sustainability reporting.

Before Shift, Brianna spearheaded innovative sustainability initiatives at Sustainable Development Technology Canada and Export Development Canada (EDC). At EDC she led the development and implementation of exciting new portfolio approaches for climate change and human rights risk management, as well as aligning EDC’s corporate reporting with international reporting frameworks, such as the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the UNGPs Reporting Framework.  She also led EDC’s international sustainability negotiations and engagements, including as co-Chair of the Equator Principles Climate Change Working Group.

Prior to joining EDC, Brianna worked for nine years as a diplomat with Canada’s foreign ministry, including four years at the United Nations General Assembly where she led environment and development negotiations, advocacy and outreach on behalf of the Government of Canada, including for the creation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Brianna has also advised international financial institutions including the World Bank Group, institutional investors, bilateral development agencies, and small- and medium-sized enterprises on the practical application of environment, climate change, human rights standards.

Brianna has an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from Queen’s University and a Master’s degree in Environmental Change & Management from the University of Oxford.

Ashleigh Owens /

Director | Financial Institutions Lead

She/Her New York City

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As Shift’s Director / Financial Institutions Lead, Ashleigh leads our work with financial institutions and supports other partners across industries, leveraging her breadth of experience to tackle cutting-edge issues and entrenched challenges on the road to implementation of the UN Guiding Principles.

Specializes in Financial Institutions | Valuing Respect

As Director / Financial Institutions Lead, Ashleigh engages directly with financial institutions, companies and investors as they embed respect for human rights into their operations and business relationships. She also leads on pieces of research under our Valuing Respect Project, which is focused on developing better ways to evaluate business respect for human rights. Ashleigh has a breadth of experience approaching the Guiding Principles from business, legal and academic perspectives and brings a holistic view to Guiding Principles implementation.

Ashleigh was previously Executive Director at Ernst & Young’s Climate Change and Sustainability Services. At EY Japan, she led a team of consultants supporting policy-making, educational program and governance design, stakeholder dialogue and due diligence strategies for multinational and domestic companies across a variety of industries.  As founder of the EY Human Rights Network, she led the enhancement of EY’s human rights capabilities across EY’s global network. In her role she was a frequent speaker and moderator of dialogues at multi-stakeholder fora and functioned as a connector between civil society, government and corporate actors with a common goal of empowering business to respect rights.

From 2012 to 2014 she conducted research at the United Nations University in the field of Sustainability Science, specializing in business and human rights. She prepared research for the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights and spent time at the UN Global Compact New York and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Ashleigh later sat on the UN Global Compact’s Human Rights and Labour Working Group and drafted the Global Compact’s 2015 Guide on How to Develop a Human Rights Policy.

Ashleigh is a lawyer qualified in Australia and England & Wales and specialized in intellectual property law, labor law and public international law. She has advised governments and companies on state human rights obligations, companies on the nexus between bilateral investment treaties and human rights and fellow lawyers on integrating the Guiding Principles into legal advice. In 2007 she won the Intellectual Property Society of Australia & NZ prize.

Ashleigh has authored or contributed to a number of publications including: Business and Human Rights: Corporate Japan Rises to the Challenge (joint publication between EY Japan and Global Compact Network Japan), Corporate Social Responsibility Can Save Japan (Op-ed in Japan Times), Cumulative Human Rights Impacts (in UN Global Compact/ Maplecroft Business Dilemmas Forum) as well as several legal publications on intellectual property law in Australia and English translations of Japanese High Court judgments. She is also a member of the Advisory Board for the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)’s Division for Prosperity.

Ashleigh has degrees in Law and Asian Studies from the University of Western Australia, with studies also conducted at the University of Vienna and Sophia University in Japan. She has a Masters of Science in Sustainability from the United Nations University and has undertaken the institution’s Leadership for Sustainability program. Ashleigh is an Australian national, and is fluent in Japanese.

Rachel Davis /

Vice President and Co-Founder

She/Her Sydney

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As the Vice President and Co-Founder of Shift, Rachel helps shape our strategy and oversees a range of our collaborations with companies, governments, investors, civil society and other partners. Rachel is also responsible for driving our work on standards advocacy and with sports associations.

Specializes in Standard Setters | Sports and Human Rights

Rachel is one of Shift’s co-founders and has led work at Shift over the last decade on standard-setting, human rights and sports, financial institutions, conflict and international law.

As Vice President, Rachel shapes our strategy and oversees a range of our collaborations with companies, governments, investors, civil society and other partners. Rachel leads Shift’s work to influence standard-setters of all kinds to integrate the UN Guiding Principles into the rules that govern business, including engaging with governments and the European Union on mandatory human rights due diligence.

Rachel also has unique experience advising and leading efforts to drive respect for human rights into the operations of global sports governing bodies. Rachel was the Chair of FIFA’s independent Human Rights Advisory Board while it operated, between 2017 and 2021. She has advised the International Olympic Committee on human rights since 2018, including co-authoring recommendations for the IOC on a comprehensive human rights strategy with former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein.

Rachel has more than a decade of experience in implementing the Guiding Principles with a wide range of organizations, including public and private financial institutions and companies from diverse business sectors and geographies, and she frequently leads and facilitates engagements with senior audiences around the world. She is the co-author of the leading study of the costs of company-community conflict in the extractive sector.

Prior to co-founding Shift, Rachel was a senior legal advisor from 2006-2011 to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on business and human rights, Harvard Professor John Ruggie. She played a pivotal role in the development of the Guiding Principles, advising on all aspects of the relationship between the Guiding Principles and national and international law.

Rachel is also a Senior Program Fellow with the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School and has experience at the highest levels of the Australian legal system and internationally, having clerked at the High Court of Australia and at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She has a particular interest in Indigenous peoples’ rights, having advised the Australian Federal Attorney-General’s Department on Indigenous affairs and acted as Ruggie’s liaison with the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues during his UN mandate.

Rachel has a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School and Bachelors degrees in Law and Politics from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where she also lectured and published in law. She is a (non-practicing) lawyer qualified in New South Wales.

Federico Burlon /

Director

He/Him London

As Director at Shift, Federico engages with business partners to better identify, prioritize and act on salient human rights issues, embedding the UN Guiding Principles in companies’ decision-making processes.

Specializes in Business Enterprises

As Director at Shift, Federico engages with business partners to better identify, prioritize and act on salient human rights issues, embedding the UN Guiding Principles in companies’ decision-making processes.

Prior to joining Shift, Federico was Head of Delivery at Impactt. Federico managed a portfolio of clients, supported by a team of consultants. He led human rights assessment and remediation projects in the construction, energy, food and shipbuilding industries. This resulted in positive outcomes such as the return of passports and reimbursement of recruitment fees to workers and the strengthening of companies’ employment practices. Federico led Impactt’s engagement with the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy in Qatar as external monitor of worker welfare in the construction of venues for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. He also developed Impactt’s Diagnostics community of practice, delivering for clients as well as building internal capacity to execute human rights assessments around the world, with a focus on worker voice.

Prior to Impactt, Federico was a Sustainability Manager at Tesco plc. He contributed to the roll out of Tesco’s ethical trading programme to the goods-not-for-resale value chain. Federico engaged with hundreds of product and services suppliers and internal purchasing and sourcing teams to raise awareness of human rights issues and to prioritise and address the findings from third-party social audits. He also worked on climate change to develop a roadmap to achieve Tesco’s carbon reduction commitments related to direct and supply chain emissions.

In prior roles, Federico worked with a variety of human rights organisations in the United Kingdom and United States.

Federico holds a MSc in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and a BA in Political Science and International Studies from Macalester College, with a focus on human rights law and international migration. He is a United World College Adriatic alumnus and is from Argentina.

Erika George /

Board Member

She/Her

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Erika George is Director of the Tanner Humanities Center and Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah. She has conducted leading research and is a passionate advocate for women’s rights, children’s rights, gender equality and environmental justice. 

Professor Erika R. George is the Associate Dean for Equity, Justice, & Engagement, Professor of Law, and Ernest Haddad Faculty Scholar at Boston University School of Law and a leading expert in business and human rights.

Professor George is the author of “Incorporating Rights: Strategies to Advance Corporate Accountability” (Oxford University Press, 2021), which examines the evolution of demands for corporate responsibility to respect international human rights. She was a founding member of the editorial board of the Business and Human Rights Journal (Cambridge University Press) and since 2022  has served on the board of Shift. 

Before joining BU Law in 2024, Professor George spent over two decades at the University of Utah as the Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law. She directed the Tanner Humanities Center for four years and worked to enhance engagement and expand and diversify audiences for public humanities programs during her tenure. She also advocated for academic freedom and the right to read. Along with the former poet laureate of Utah, she co-founded the PEN America Utah Chapter to protect access to information and prevent censorship. 

Professor George is an elected member of the American Law Institute, an American Bar Foundation fellow, a trustee of Earthjustice, and serves on the Executive Board of the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights.

She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Society of American Law Teachers’ M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award and the Salt Lake City Human Rights Commission Human Rights Award.

Professor George earned her BA with honors from the University of Chicago, a MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a JD from Harvard Law School. She also clerked for Judge William T. Hart of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. She was a litigation associate at the law firm of Jenner & Block in Chicago before joining Human Rights Watch as a research fellow.

We recorded an interview with Professor George when she joined Shift’s Board in February of 2022. It is available here.

Erika George is Director of the Tanner Humanities Center and Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah. Prior to joining the University of Utah, Professor George served as a law clerk and litigation associate at prominent firms in both Illinois and New York. She also worked as a fellow and later consultant at Human Rights Watch, where she conducted investigations in South Africa on women’s rights, children’s rights, violence, the right to education and abuses related to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She wrote a book-length report, Scared at School: Sexual Violence Against Girls in South African Schools, which received widespread media coverage in South Africa and internationally. She currently serves as special counsel to the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.

Her scholarship has appeared in the California Law Review, the Michigan Journal of International Law, the New York University Journal of International Law and Policy, and the annual proceedings of the American Society of International Law.

Professor George has served on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Department of State Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan and as a member of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah. She is an Editor for the blog globaljusticeblog.com.

We recorded an interview with Professor George when she joined Shift’s Board in February of 2022. It is available here.

John Ruggie /

Founding Chair / In Memoriam

John Ruggie is the author of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

In Memory of John Ruggie

John served as the founding Chair of Shift from 2011 to 2021. He was the Berthold Beitz Research Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He also taught at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California, and at Columbia University where he became Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. From 1997-2001 John served as UN Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Planning in the cabinet of Kofi Annan; from 2002-2005 as Special Advisor to the Secretary-General for the Global Compact; and from 2005-2011 as Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Business and Human Rights.

A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, he received numerous awards from academic and professional societies for his contributions to social science, public policy and the development of international law. In addition to serving as Shift’s Board Chairman, John was also on the Board of Arabesque Asset Management Holding Company as well as Unilever’s Sustainability Advisory Council. His book, Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights, has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.

Caroline Rees /

President and Co-Founder

She/Her New York City

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As Shift’s President, Caroline leads our strategic development and drives our thought leadership work on key challenges and opportunities in advancing corporate respect for business and human rights.

As the President and Co-Founder of Shift, Caroline leads our organizational strategy and development and drives our thought leadership work on key challenges and opportunities in advancing corporate respect for business and human rights. Caroline speaks extensively at events around the world and frequently facilitates dialogue and debate amongst companies, governments, investors and civil society. In recent years, Caroline has focused on improving corporate human rights reporting as a catalyst for better human rights risk management, and on improving the data and methods used in evaluating companies’ social performance as part of ESG (environmental, social and governance) analysis. She has written and spoken extensively on the relevance of business respect for human rights, and the UNGPs specifically, to movements that seek to advance sustainability, equality, ESG investing, stakeholder capitalism, and human and social capital.

Caroline previously spent 14 years with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. From 2003 to 2006 she led the UK’s human rights negotiating team at the UN and she ran the negotiations to establish the mandate of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on business and human rights. The success of this initiative led to Professor John Ruggie’s appointment and from 2007-2011 Caroline was a lead advisor on his team and deeply involved in the drafting of the Guiding Principles.

From 2009 to 2011 Caroline was also the Director of the Governance and Accountability Program at the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School and she remains a Senior Program Fellow there. Caroline is a member of the Imperatives Board of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the Board of the Capitals Coalition, the Unilever Sustainability Advisory Council, and the Steering Committee of the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures.

Caroline’s prior British foreign service career covered Iran, Slovakia, the UN Security Council in New York and the European Union in Brussels. Caroline has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) from Oxford University and a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Caroline is a British national and speaks English, French and German.