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.