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:Google doesn't target ads

[AmiMoJo]

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

Yes, that's the entire point of FTA and the study, thanks for repeating it. Neither TFA nor the study is blaming Google for this.

The issue is that the current gender imbalance appears to be creating a feedback loop that re-enforces it.