Study: Women Less Likely To Be Shown Ads For High-paid Jobs On Google

An anonymous reader writes: A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has found that women seeking jobs are less likely to be shown ads on Google for high-paying jobs than men. The researchers created more than 17,000 fake profiles, which were shown roughly 600,000 ads on career-finding websites (abstract). All of the profiles shared the same browsing behavior. "One experiment showed that Google displayed adverts for a career coaching service for '$200k+' executive jobs 1,852 times to the male group and only 318 times to the female group." The article notes, "Google allows users to opt out of behavioral advertising and provides a system to see why users were shown ads and to customize their ad settings. But the study suggests that there is a transparency and overt discrimination issue in the wider advertising landscape."

Comments

Re:Focused advertising based on detected trends

[AmiMoJo]

What this means is that somewhere in Google's algorithm they have found that people that claim to be women (this is the internet after all), are less likely to click on ads for high paying jobs.

It's a chicken and egg situation. Do they advertise to women less because fewer women click ads for high paying jobs, or do fewer women click ads for high paying jobs because they advertise them to women less?

It's a feedback loop, and other studies suggest that such loops are usually not a good thing.

Re:Algorithm

[AmiMoJo]

Except when it's not. Which in this case clearly indicates there's a profile that's made up of more than just search terms.

If you had read the abstract you would know that the researchers used the privacy settings and minimal profiles that didn't provide any other information, then after building up a search history set only the gender field. So, they carefully made sure that that the only information available was search history and gender.

Are you suggesting that advertisers shouldn't be allowed to target ads? Are you suggesting freedom to engage in advertising should be modified by rules?

Yes, of course. Advertisers already have lots of rules that they must follow. No lies, no misleading claims, no adverts for tobacco products, no adverts for toys in the breaks between children's programmes based on them etc. The exact rules depend on your jurisdiction of course, but there is certainly precedent for not allowing behaviour that is deemed harmful to society in general.

This might also run foul of European human rights rules. For example, insurers can't give discounts based on gender. Banks can't weight women's lower than men's when considering mortgage applications. It's possible that without a good reason (e.g. advertising for products that can only be used by one gender) the advertisers may not be allowed to discriminate in this way.