Don't conflate "meaningful" with "predictive". The attributes are indeed predictive. The intention of the model is to make accurate predictions optimally given

Don't conflate "meaningful" with "predictive". The attributes are indeed predictive. The intention of the model is to make accurate predictions optimally given the data its fed. If you give it data that contains predictive correlations with race and gender, yes, it will learn them. It should be pretty clear that the root problem there though is the data, not the model.