Google image results can shift gender biases

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-04/uow-wac040915.php

Public Release: 9-Apr-2015
University of Washington

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 frazzled caregivers rather than powerful CEOs.

A new University of Washington study adds to those efforts by assessing how accurately gender representations in online image search results for 45 different occupations match reality.

In a few jobs -- including CEO -- women were significantly underrepresented in Google image search results, the study found, and that can change searchers' worldviews. Across all the professions, women were slightly underrepresented on average.

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In some jobs, the discrepancies were pronounced, the study found. In a Google image search for CEO, 11 percent of the people depicted were women, compared with 27 percent of U.S. CEOs who are women.

Twenty-five percent of people depicted in image search results for authors are women, compared with 56 percent of actual U.S. authors.

By contrast, 64 percent of the telemarketers depicted in image search results were female, while that occupation is evenly split between men and women.

Yet for nearly half of the professions - such as nurse practitioner (86 percent women), engineer (13 percent women), and pharmacist (54 percent women) -- those two numbers were within five percentage points.

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They asked study volunteers a series of questions about a particular job, including how many men and women worked in that field. Two weeks later, they showed them a set of manipulated search image results and asked the same questions.

Exposure to skewed image search results did shift their estimates slightly, accounting for 7 percent of those second opinions. The study did not test long-term changes in perception, but other research suggests that many small exposures to biased information over time can have a lasting effect on everything from personal preconceptions to hiring practices.

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