Incident 18: Gender Biases of Google Image Search
Entities
View all entitiesIncident Stats
CSETv1 Taxonomy Classifications
Taxonomy DetailsHarm Distribution Basis
sex
Sector of Deployment
information and communication
CSETv0 Taxonomy Classifications
Taxonomy DetailsFull Description
Reports show Google Image produces results that under-represent women in leadership roles. When searching "CEO" in Google Images, approximately 11% of results feature women while around 28% of CEO's in the United States were women when this complaint was raised. Other examples include the search under "cop" returning results where the first woman featured is wearing a "sexy Halloween costume". Another report showed that when searching "CEO" the first woman to appear was a version of Barbie doll, and that didn't appear until the 12th row of results.
Short Description
Google Image returns results that under-represent women in leadership roles, notably with the first photo of a female "CEO" being a Barbie doll after 11 rows of male CEOs.
Severity
Minor
Harm Distribution Basis
Sex
Harm Type
Harm to social or political systems
AI System Description
Google Image search that allows a search based on a word or phrase to produce photos deemed relevant to that search phrase
System Developer
Sector of Deployment
Information and communication
Relevant AI functions
Perception, Cognition
AI Techniques
Google Image, image processing
AI Applications
image suggestion, image processing, image content processing
Location
Global
Named Entities
Technology Purveyor
Beginning Date
2018-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
Ending Date
2018-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
Near Miss
Harm caused
Intent
Accident
Lives Lost
No
Data Inputs
open source internet, user requests, user searches
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Who’s a CEO? Google image results can shift gender biases
Jennifer Langston UW News
Getty Images last year created a new online image catalog of women in the workplace – one that countered visual stereotypes on the Internet of moms as frazz…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
The University of Washington just released a preview of a study that claims search engine results can influence people's perceptions about how many men or women hold certain jobs. One figure quoted in the preview is that in a Google image s…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
The Ellen Pao-Kleiner Perkins trial shone a light on discrimination in the tech industry, but for a more immediate look at the challenges women face in corporate America, look no further than a Google Images search.
Doing a search at the si…
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- View the report at the Internet Archive
Google is a modern oracle, and a miraculous one at that. It can lead you to the Perfect Strangers theme song lyrics, or to a satellite image of your childhood neighborhood, or to a blueprint for building a quantum computer. But for as much …
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
In today's modern professional world men can be doctors, investment bankers, and professors, while women, of course, can be nurses, secretaries, and sexy Halloween costume models—at least according to Google Image Search.
Why did we spend a…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Not all doctors or CEOs are men. Not all nurses are women. But you might think otherwise if you searched for these professions in Google images.
It turns out that there's a noticeable gender bias in the image search results for some jobs, a…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Try this: Google image "CEO." Notice anything? The first female Google image search result for "CEO" appears TWELVE rows down—and it's Barbie.
A recent study conducted at the University of Washington sought to examine how well female repres…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Search the term "CEO" in Google Images and the first picture of woman you get is a picture of Barbie in a suit.
This "gender bias" has become apparent after a paper was published showing that many image searches for specific occupations fav…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Just when you thought biases were a completely human construct, more evidence suggests that both algorithms and interfaces could be biased, too.
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The latest example of this is from a study conducted by researchers from Universi…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
Fresh off the revelation that Google image searches for “CEO” only turn up pictures of white men, there’s new evidence that algorithmic bias is, alas, at it again. In a paper published in April, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon Un…
- View the original report at its source
- View the report at the Internet Archive
“You can’t be what you can’t see,” Marie Wilson of the White House Project said back in 2010. According to a new study, Google Images may not be helping to improve the situation.
AdView analyzed employment data to determine the number of wo…
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