ABSTRACT
There is much concern about algorithms that underlie information services and the view of the world they present. We develop a novel method for examining the content and strength of gender stereotypes in image search, inspired by the trait adjective checklist method. We compare the gender distribution in photos retrieved by Bing for the query "person" and for queries based on 68 character traits (e.g., "intelligent person") in four regional markets. Photos of men are more often retrieved for "person," as compared to women. As predicted, photos of women are more often retrieved for warm traits (e.g., "emotional") whereas agentic traits (e.g., "rational") are represented by photos of men. A backlash effect, where stereotype-incongruent individuals are penalized, is observed. However, backlash is more prevalent for "competent women" than "warm men." Results underline the need to understand how and why biases enter search algorithms and at which stages of the engineering process.
- Colin Allen, Wendell Wallach, and Iva Smit. 2006. Why machine ethics? IEEE Intelligent Systems 21, 4, 12--17. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andrea E. Abele and Susanne Bruckmüller. 2011. The bigger one of the "Big Two"? Preferential processing of communal information. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47, 935--948.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Andrea E. Abele, Mirjam Uchronski, Caterina Suitner, and Bogdan Wojciszke. 2008. Towards an operationalization of the fundamental dimensions of agency and communion: Trait content ratings in five countries considering valence and frequency of word occurrence. European Journal of Social Psychology 38, 1202--1217.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Leif Azzopardi and Vishwa Vinay. 2008. Retrievability: an evaluation measure for higher order information access tasks. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management (CIKM '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 561--570. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Paul Baker and Amanda Potts. 2013. "Why do White People have Thin Lips?" Google and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes via Auto-complete Search Forms. Critical Discourse Studies 10, 2: 187--204.Google ScholarCross Ref
- S. A. Basow. 1986. Gender Stereotypes: Traditions and Alternatives. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.Google Scholar
- Michelle C. Bligh, Michele M. Schlehofer, Bettina J. Casad, and Amber M. Gaffney. 2012. Competent enough, but would you vote for her? Gender stereotypes and media influences on perceptions of women politicians. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 42, 3: 560--597.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Engin Bozdag. 2013. Bias in algorithmic filtering and personalization. Ethics and Information Technology 15, 3: 209--227. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amy J. Cuddy, Susan T. Fiske, and Peter Glick. 2008. Warmth and competence as universal dimensions of social perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS Map. Advances in Experimental Psychology 40, 61--149.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Anupam Datta, Shayak Sen and Yair Zick. 2016. Algorithmic transparency via quantitative input influence. Proceedings of the 37th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, 598617.Google Scholar
- Nicholas Diakopoulos. 2015. Algorithmic accountability: Journalistic investigation of computational power structures. Digital Journalism 3, 3: 398--415.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Amanda B. Diekman and Alice H. Eagly. 2000. Stereotypes as dynamic constructs: Women and men of the past, present and future. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26, 10, 1171--1188.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Alice H. Eagly, and Steven J. Karau. 2002. Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological review 109, 3, 573--598.Google Scholar
- Motahhare Eslami, Aimee Rickman, Kristen Vaccaro, Amirhossein Aleyasen, Andy Vuong, Karrie Karahalios, Kevin Hamilton, and Christian Sandvig. 2015. "I always assumed that I wasn't really that close to {her}": Reasoning about Invisible Algorithms in News Feeds. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 153--162. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Randi Ettner and Antonio Guillamon. 2016. Theories of the Etiology of Transgender Identity. In R. Ettner, S. Monstrey, and E. Coleman (eds.), Principles of Transgender Medicine and Surgery (pp. 3--15). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
- Brian S. Everitt and Torsten Hothorn. 2009. Statistical Analysis Using R. Chapman and Hall / CRC.Google Scholar
- Susan T. Fiske, Amy J. C. Cuddy, Peter Glick, and Jun Xu. 2002. A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82, 6, 878--902.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Batya Friedman and Helen Nissenbaum. 1996. Bias in computer systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) 14, 3: 330--347. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G.M. Gilbert. 1951. Stereotype persistence and change among college students. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 46, 245--254.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Tarleton Gillespie. 2014. The Relevance of Algorithms. Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society: 167.Google Scholar
- Ayşe Göker, Richard Butterworth, Andrew MacFarlane, Tana Ahmed, and Simone Stumpf. 2016. Expeditions through image jungles: the commercial use of image libraries in an online environment. Journal of Documentation 72,1, 5--23.Google ScholarCross Ref
- David L. Hamilton and Tina K. Trolier. 1986. Stereotypes and stereotyping: An overview of the cognitive approach. In J. Dovidio and S. L. Gaertner (eds.), Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism (pp. 127--163). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
- Aniko Hannak, Piotr Sapiezynski, Arash Molavi Kakhki, Balachander Krishnamurthy, David Lazer, Alan Mislove, and Christo Wilson. 2013. Measuring personalization of web search. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web, pp. 527--538. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marvin Karlins, Thomas L. Coffman and Gary Walters. 1969. On the fading of social stereotypes: Studies in three generations of college students. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 13, 1--16.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Daniel Katz and Kenneth Braly. 1933. Racial stereotypes of one hundred college students. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 28, 3, 280--290.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Matthew Kay, Cynthia Matuszek, and Sean A. Munson. 2015. Unequal Representation and Gender Stereotypes in Image Search Results for Occupations. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3819--3828. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Elena Konkova, Andrew MacFarlane and Ayşe Göker. 2016. Analysing creative image search information needs. Knowledge Organization 43, 1: 13--21.Google ScholarCross Ref
- John D. Lee and Katrina A. See. 2004. Trust in Automation: Designing for Appropriate Reliance. Human Factors 46, 1 (Spring 2004): 50--80.Google ScholarCross Ref
- John Ludbrook. 1998. Multiple comparison procedures updated. Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology, 25, 12, 1032--1037.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Stephanie Madon, Max Guyll, Kathy Aboufadel, Eulices Montiel, Alison Smith, Polly Palumbo, and Lee Jussim. 2001. Ethnic and national stereotypes: The Princeton Trilogy revisited and revised. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27, 8, 996--1010.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lori McCay-Peet and Elaine Toms. 2009. Image use within the work task model: Images as information and illustration. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 60, 12 (December 2009), 2416--2429. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, Julie E. Phelan, and Laurie A. Rudman. 2010. When men break the gender rules: Status incongruity and backlash against modest men. Psychology of Men & Masculinity 11, 2: 140--151.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Michael Mudrick. 2015. Pervasively offside: A gendered analysis of sportscasting. Doctoral dissertation, Paper 722. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/772Google Scholar
- Clifford Nass and Youngme Moon. 2000. Machines and mindlessness: Social responses to computers. Journal of Social Issues 56, 1, 81--103.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Safiya Umoja Noble. 2012. Missed connections: What search engines say about women. Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture 54 (Spring 2012), 37--41.Google Scholar
- Jahna Otterbacher. 2015. Crowdsourcing Stereotypes: Linguistic Bias in Metadata Generated via GWAP. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1955--1964. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bing Pan, Helene Hembrooke, Thorsten Joachims, Lori Lorigo, Geri Gay, and Laura Granka. 2007. In Google We Trust: Users' Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 12, 3: 801--823.Google ScholarCross Ref
- James W. Pennebaker, Ryan L. Boyd, Kayla Jordan, and Kate Blackburn. 2015. The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2015. https://utexasir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2152/31333/LIWC2015_LanguageManual.pdf'sequence=3Google Scholar
- Emilee Rader and Rebecca Gray. 2015. Understanding User Beliefs About Algorithmic Curation in the Facebook News Feed. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 173--182. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Laurie A. Rudman and Peter Glick. 2001. Prescriptive gender stereotypes and backlash toward agentic women. Journal of Social Issues 57, 4, 743--762.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Laurie A. Rudman and Julie E. Phelan. 2008. Backlash effects for disconfirming gender stereotypes in organizations. Organizational Behavior 28, 61--79.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Stefanie Simon and Crystal L. Hoyt. 2012. Exploring the effect of media images on women's leadership self-perceptions and aspirations. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 16, 2, 232--245.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Charlotte Templin. 1999. Hillary Clinton as threat to gender norms: Cartoon images of the first lady. Journal of Communication Inquiry 23, 1, 20--36.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Myriam C. Traub, Thaer Samar, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Jiyin He, Argen de Vries, and Lynda Hardman. 2016. Querylog-based assessment of retrievability bias in a large newspaper corpus. In Proccedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '16), ACM, Newark, NJ, 7--16. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sherry Turkle. 1997. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster. Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Gender & society 1.2, 125--151.Google Scholar
- Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Gender & society 1.2, 125--151.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Competent Men and Warm Women: Gender Stereotypes and Backlash in Image Search Results
Recommendations
The Influence of Gender-Ethnic Intersectionality on Gender Stereotypes about IT Skills and Knowledge
One line of investigation in attempting to better understand the gender imbalance in the information technology (IT) field is to examine gender stereotypes about the skills and knowledge in the IT profession. A survey of 4046 university students in the ...
See feminine - Think incompetent? The effects of a feminine outfit on the evaluation of women's computer competence
According to common gender stereotypes, women are assumed to have lower computer skills than men. Following the interactive model of Deaux and Major (1987), target attributes or situational cues can activate stereotypes. Can the outfit of a woman elicit ...
Collaborative Learning Eliminates the Negative Impact of Gender Stereotypes on Women's Self-Concept (Abstract Only)
SIGCSE '16: Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science EducationCultural stereotypes about women's "fit" and ability in technical fields, like computing, are alive and well. These cultural beliefs can make their way into women's personal belief system. When this happens, women's self-conceptions in computing suffer, ...
Comments