Hi Google,
I can’t even imagine how frantic you are supplying answers, images, entertainment, education and information to 40,000 searches every second of the day so I’ll try to keep this brief.
I want to talk about your algorithms. I get that they’re the key to your limitless riches so I’m not asking you to divulge anything top secret or confidential. But I am hoping, in the spirit of “not being evil“, you’ll consider a few tweaks. Because your algorithms are killing me.
A few months back I was astonished to discover that a google image search for ‘CEO’ turned up six pages (SIX!) of mostly anglo-men before a female was shown. And, when a woman finally popped up she was Barbie. Not exactly reassuring, is it?
And the tricky bit is, there’s this whole chicken and egg thing going on that make this more problematic than a simple quirk of one search. Because if we (by which I mean you) present the population with images of CEOs who all look a certain way, are of a certain age and a certain gender, it’s pretty powerful in reinforcing the already stubborn, entrenched and powerful notion of how leaders should look. White, male and middle aged.
I was going to say ‘I’m not sure if you know’ but you’re Google so you know everything. Remember how in America there are four times as many men called John, James, Robert & William running companies than there are women? And for context, in the US, Johns, Jameses, Roberts and Williams make up just 5.9% of the population. Women make up 51.2% of the population. (Here in Australia Peter & David are the winning names.)
Breaking that mould is a critical challenge for organisations and communities that recognise the extraordinary value in unlocking diversity. Companies like yours. A year ago your senior VP of people operations, Laszlo Bock, made this very point about the fact men comprise 70% of all Googlers.
“We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realise we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues. Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.”
The facts in your own company, as you would know well, are not dissimilar to the facts in other companies and organisations around the world. Men do comprise the overwhelming majority of CEOs but your search results exaggerate their majority. The results for a Google image search for the term “CEO” were only 11% female, but women actually make up 27% of CEOs in America.
At the very least would you consider engaging some of your talented googlers to adjust the algorithm so that an image search for a CEO presents a realistic depiction?
The other reason I am writing today is because I just read a study from Carnegie Mellon University and the International Computer Science Institute. They used custom software to simulate the browsing activities of web users found that when visiting job sites, fake male users were more frequently shown ads promising large salaries than fake female users. Turns out your algorithm shows women far fewer ads for prestigious jobs as men.
“I think our findings suggest that there are parts of the ad ecosystem where kinds of discrimination are beginning to emerge and there is a lack of transparency,” Anupam Datta, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon and a co-author of the study, told MIT Technology Review. “This is concerning from a societal standpoint.”
Datta said that targeted advertising like Google’s is so ubiquitous that the information shown to people could have tangible effects on the decisions they make. Here is where we get into chicken-and-the-egg territory again. As you are no doubt well aware, a stubborn pay gap exists between men and women. Here in Australia it’s growing. There are plenty of factors that contribute to it, not least of which is the greater proportion of men in higher-paid executive positions. (Especially those lucky Johns, Peters, Roberts, Jameses and Davids).
One of the favoured fall-back explanations for the pay gap is that women don’t ask for more money. Or they fail to apply for jobs and promotions as optimistically as their male peers do. None of this actually explains the pay gap but it helps companies and individuals avoid taking any action to redress the gap.
Surely, as the progressive, keen-to-tackle-discrimination-and-improve-diversity corporate behemoth that you are, you don’t want to contribute to this dynamic? Surely you would want to sit down with the report and examine the ways your algorithms might be making matters worse, right?
Your statement in The Independent suggests you might not.
“Advertisers can choose to target the audience they want to reach, and we have policies that guide the type of interest-based ads that are allowed,” reads the statement.
Julia Carpenter makes a pertinent point here:
“The interesting thing about the fake users in the Ad Fisher study, however, is that they had entirely fresh search histories: In fact, the accounts used were more or less identical, except for their listed gender identity. That would seem to indicate either that advertisers are requesting that high-paying job ads only display to men (and that Google is honoring that request) or that some type of bias has been programmed, if inadvertently, into Google’s ad-personalization system.
In either case, Datta, the Carnegie Mellon researcher, says there’s room for much more scholarship, and scrutiny, here.
“Many important decisions in society these days are being made by algorithms,” he said. “These algorithms run inside of boxes that we don’t have access to the internal details of. The genesis of this project was that we wanted to peek inside this box a little to see if there are more undesirable consequences of this activity going on.”
Take a look? Much appreciated.
With great power comes great responsibility. Tackling gender inequality and fostering greater diversity in workplaces won’t happen by accident. It will take concerted effort not just to avoid being evil but to embrace being proactive about creating positive change. Your commitment to this end would be appreciated and couldn’t be overstated.
A concerned searcher,
Georgie