The other day I was searching for a stock image of a female president. I was curious how the top result was male presidents. I had to specify that I was looking for a president who was a woman.
In contrast, when I typed "hair salon" into the search engine, I got mostly images of women on the results site.
That's what I try to explain when I talk about how these biases are present in our daily lives. Even in a simple Google search.
This concern about how SERPs reinforce biases is not new. In 2013, UN Women launched a campaign called “ The Truth About Autocomplete ” that showed how the autocomplete function suggested some stereotypical ideas.
On the other hand, writer Safiya Noble, in her book Algorithms of Oppression, shows and criticizes how search engines play an important role in reinforcing stereotypes.
Among all of these, the author talks about how Google has a history tunisia phone number list of racism. In a brief example, he showed the results that appear when typing "professional hairstyle" related to white women with straight hair and the "unprofessional hairstyle" related to African or black women.
In recent research using word embeddings in massive Internet text corpora, words representing the concept of “people” (e.g., “someone” or “human”) were more likely to occur with terms for “men” than for “women,” a demonstration of the “default masculinity” bias that is collectively displayed among individuals in a society.
Unconscious bias and marketing decisions
As I said before, bias is everywhere. Including our marketing approaches. Even some experts admit that biases can lead us to be bad marketers . This is proof of how our minds can play against us and lead us to lose conversions.
What should search engines do about this issue?
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