CSEE Seminar - Competent Men and Warm Women: Gender Stereotypes and Backlash in Image Search Results

In this presentation I will discuss results from a recent study of the gender distribution in photos retrieved by Bing for the query “person” and for queries based on 68 character traits (e.g., “intelligent person”) in four regional markets.

Photos of men are more often retrieved for “person,” as compared to women. As predicted, photos of women are more often retrieved for warm traits (e.g., “emotional”) whereas agentic traits (e.g., “rational”) are represented by photos of men. A backlash effect, where stereotype-incongruent individuals are penalized, is observed. However, backlash is more prevalent for “competent women” than “warm men.” Results underline the need to understand how and why biases enter search algorithms and at which stages of the engineering process. This formed the basis of a CHI'17 paper and aligns with current concerns about algorithms that underlie information services, especially search engines, and the view of the world they present and the extent to which they are biased.I will also briefly discuss a current H2020 project called CyCAT (see: http://www.cycat.io/) that we are involved with that seeks to develop the first Centre for Algorithmic Transparency in Cyprus.