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 search for CEO, only 11 percent of the people returned were women (by comparison, the university says 27 percent of CEOs in the US are women). That's pretty crazy, so I decided to fire up incognito mode in Chrome and search Google Images as an Anonymous Internet Person to see the authentic, natural results. And, uh, the results are insane. I haven't seen this many white men in suits since the last time I was in church.
Here's a look, zoomed way out to 50 percent:
No women to be found. Oh, wait. See that thumbnail in the bottom row to the right?
CEO Barbie. This is the first woman who appears in a Google Image search for "CEO," rows and rows and rows below the top results — and she's not even a real Barbie doll! This image is actually from a 2005 Onion article which sarcastically observed that "women don't run companies," they just "work behind the scenes to bring a man's vision to light." This may be the most meta Onion joke of all time.
Stuff gets even crazier if you broaden the search terms.
Oh hey this CEO image search thing gets even better @chillmage pic.twitter.com/RxiHGeENPB — Eileen Ridge (@notbangalore) April 9, 2015
Search for "male CEO" or "man CEO" and you just get pictures of dudes who run companies. Search for "woman CEO" or "female CEO" and you get a whole bunch of wacky, gendered suggested search categories, including:
Outfit
Attire
Glasses
Successful Business Woman Profile
Business Woman Silhouette
Google's search engine intelligence may be mostly artificial, but it's bootstrapped by the garbage expectations that many of its users feed into the system over time. Getting rid of nasty occupational stereotypes will require better human intelligence.
Oh, and in case Bing and Yahoo thought they'd get off easy, they're not any better: