Googles Chauvinistic Job Advertising Delivery
July 28, 2015
I thought we were working to get more women into the tech industry, not fewer. That’s why it was so disappointing to read, “Google Found to Specifically Target Men Over Women When It Comes to High-Paid Job Adverts” at IBTimes. It was a tool dubbed AdFisher, developed by some curious folks at Carnegie Mellon and the International Computer Science Institute, that confirmed the disparity. Knowing that internet-usage tracking determines what ads each of us sees, the researchers wondered whether such “tailored ad experiences” were limiting employment opportunities for half the population. Reporter Alistair Charlton writes:
“AdFisher works by acting as thousands of web users, each taking a carefully chosen route across the internet in such a way that an ad-targeting network like Google Ads will infer certain interests and characteristics from them. The programme then records which adverts are displayed when it later visits a news website that uses Google’s ad network. It can be set to act as a man or woman, then flag any differences in the adverts it is shown.
“Anupam Datta, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said in the MIT Technology Review: ‘I think our findings suggest that there are parts of the ad ecosystem where kinds of discrimination are beginning to emerge and there is a lack of transparency. This is concerning from a societal standpoint.’”
Indeed it is, good sir. The team has now turned AdFisher’s attention to Microsoft’s Bing; will that search platform prove to be just as chauvinistic? For Google’s part, they say they’re looking into the study’s methodology to “understand its findings.” It remains to be seen what sort of parent the search giant will be; will it simply defend its algorithmic offspring, or demand it mend its ways?
Cynthia Murrell, July 28, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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