🎉 Exciting news: PIN Sport App has been awarded a BRIDGE Proof of Concept grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation and Innosuisse!
We’re thrilled to share that our founder Pearl Oti-Amoako‘s project “PIN Sport Social: Bias-Aware Matching Engine for Sport Club Recruiting” has been selected for BRIDGE PoC funding — Switzerland’s leading program bridging scientific research and market-ready innovation.
Over the next 12 months, I’ll be joining the University of Lausanne (UNIL) full-time as a researcher in the group of Dr. Carlos Gómez González, senior lecturer in sports socioeconomics at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences und UNIL Sport (ISSUL), to design and validate a bias-aware matching infrastructure directly on the live PIN Sport App platform.
This project builds on research that started with Pearl’s Master’s thesis at the University of Zurich, which showed that applicants with foreign-sounding names receive measurably fewer positive responses from Swiss amateur sport clubs — and that awareness campaigns alone aren’t enough to close that gap. PIN Sport Social takes the next step: testing whether the architecture of the matching process itself, not just messaging, can structurally reduce ethnic and gender bias in access to sport.
Two field experiments on our live platform will put this to the test.
A huge thank you to Dr. Carlos Gómez González for his continued mentorship and collaboration, and to Emmanuel Delamarche and the team at Knowledge Transfer UNIL-CHUV for their invaluable support throughout the application process. Grateful also to BRIDGE (SNSF & Innosuisse) for backing this work.
More updates to come as the project kicks off. 🙌
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