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?

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.