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:Algorithm

[peon_a-z,A-Z,0-9$_ !]

Exactly, great point. Why would someone who is intelligent click on such an ad? I don't make $200k+, but I always assumed that clicking that link is a path to a Nigerian Prince promising that salary.

Why does Carnegie Mellon imply that women should be shown stupider ads than the present algorithm identifies?

Screwing employers

[mwvdlee]

Employers typically pay for the number of profiles on a site, either directly or indirectly.
CMU is screwing with employers by creating 17k fake profiles.

Re:Algorithm

[phayes]

Probably even simpler: There are more ads specifically targeting women (shoes, makeup, etc) than for men making their ad pool larger and thus automatically diminishing the opportunity for ads for of high paying google to be shown.

But of course that won't stop someone with a spreadsheet & a mission from finding a correlation & implying a sinister causation.

Re:Google doesn't target ads

[KermodeBear]

His point still stands.

Advertisers are buying ad impressions for certain demographics. The advertisers are buying more ads for these jobs that target males.

It isn't Google doing this - they're just offering the advertising tools. It's the purchasers of the ads that are causing this to happen.

This is not complex.

Re:Algorithm

[dj245]

The ads that Google shows you are based on your search terms most of the time.

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.

The search terms were identical for all profiles, male or female. The authors of the paper admit in the abstract that they don't know who is responsible for the different results, but since the only difference was the "gender" setting it is clear that at some point in the chain (Google, advertisers, recruitment companies) there is a rule that says "favour males", just like there is a rule that says "favour females" for tampon adverts.

Right, confirming that it's not just search terms. So we agree, there's a profile involved, not just search terms.

The difference between those two examples, and why one is a problem, is hopefully obvious.

It's really not obvious. 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? You're implying that. On what basis do you justify telling corporations how to spend their ad money?

Google generally shows ads that they think you want to see. They learn from feedback- which links you click and which you scroll by immediately. They aggregate that data, then slice it and dice it into different personas (or profiles). I am sure they have categories which all people fall into 2 broad categories, and they have a separate profile for every user. All their data mining and AI research result in a weird reflection of humanity. If that results in women not seeing certain ads, I can only conclude that that is because women generally don't want to see them, or prefer to see other types of ads instead. Perhaps the majority of women prefer to see ads for jobs with more schedule flexibility. That would be a reasonable conclusion since only women can carry fetuses to term, and doing so requires some amount of schedule flexibility. More than 50% of women have children, and determining who does and does not want children is probably not easy- even people with very strong opinions on the matter (like myself 10 years ago) do change their mind suddenly, for a variety of reasons which may defy profiling.