{"id":519,"date":"2008-02-29T19:56:37","date_gmt":"2008-02-29T09:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2008\/02\/29\/is-google-search-sexist\/"},"modified":"2008-02-29T19:58:36","modified_gmt":"2008-02-29T09:58:36","slug":"is-google-search-sexist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2008\/02\/29\/is-google-search-sexist\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Google Search sexist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was using Google Search today to search for a person’s first name. (No, I wasn’t playing a Name Game<\/a>, but I was trying to figure out the most popular spelling of a name.) I noticed a new feature had been added to Google Search. The search results may include images from Google Images.<\/p>\n

I noticed this because when I searched for a woman’s name, the top result was a set of bikini-clad glamour shots. (For the record, I checked and found I had the default ‘moderate’ behaviour for ‘SafeSearch’, which is Google’s filtering against explicit sexual content.)<\/p>\n

I noticed that I got pictures of women when I searched for women’s names, but no pictures when I searched for the male equivalent.<\/p>\n

Here’s a forward peek at what I mean. The 80th most popular woman’s name is Erika<\/a>. Coincidentally, the 80th most popular man’s name is Erik<\/a>. At the time of writing, Google returns glamour shots for Erika but not for Erik.<\/p>\n

Is Google objectifying women, by suggesting the most important thing about them is photos of their bodies?<\/p>\n

I decided to do an experiment on the sexism of Google Search. I promised myself I would publish the result here whatever it was, in an attempt to avoid publication bias.<\/p>\n

I went to the US Social Security Data<\/a>, which I have found useful<\/a> before<\/a>. I extracted the top 100 male and female names for 25 year old Americans.<\/p>\n

I wrote some software to search Google for each name and record if images were the top link.<\/p>\n

I knew at the time I wrote it that it was violating the Google Terms of Service. I granted myself an exemption from the rules, because it was only a small batch of searches, it was a once-off run (not an ongoing tax on the servers) and because I was testing Google itself – Google shouldn’t be able to avoid scrutiny by pointing to small print. Unfortunately, the Google web-site didn’t recognise my self-declared exemption, and immediately detected my searches as foul play (most probably the User-Agent string gave me away). Rather than pushing my luck and being more stealthy, I reverted to a slower manual method, which meant a smaller sample size.<\/p>\n

I decided to limit the sample size to 25 of each gender. In 50 names, only three returned images (one male, two female). This wasn’t enough to draw a conclusion.<\/p>\n

Rather than publish a dead-boring blog article, I decided to plow on to get more data. (Danger: Publication bias slipped back in here!)<\/p>\n

I pondered whether the popularity of the names meant there was so many pages to choose from with high Page Rank, that Google didn’t need to resort to Google Images. I moved to the bottom of the list and repeated the experiment – e.g. the 76th to 100th most popular male and female names.<\/p>\n

This time, I got eight sets of images, one male and seven female.<\/p>\n

So overall, 4% of men’s names and 16% of women’s names were associated with images. The men’s names (Jason and Todd) were not associated with glamour shots, while almost all of the women’s images were.<\/p>\n

Of course, I am not really blaming Google here; it is merely reflecting the gender issues of the world-wide web. However, I thought it was an interesting result.<\/p>\n

To get a more conclusive result, I would look at automating the process using the proper Google Search API and also use rarer names. I would also do a proper statistic analysis to work out the level of significance of this result. Obviously, more research funding is required.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is Google objectifying women, by suggesting the most important thing about them is photos of their bodies?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31,21],"tags":[230,114,115,243,100,95],"class_list":["post-519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-observation","tag-experiment","tag-google","tag-names","tag-sexism","tag-statistics","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}