Below rows of images portraying countless males, some which feature Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg in various poses, and stock images of males holding or next to a piece of paper that says “CEO”, you’ll find Barbie, pink briefcase in hand.
Barbie trumps Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi and Xerox’s Ursula Burns.
Ironically, the image is attached to a 2005 article from parody site The Onion, entitled CEO Barbie criticised for promoting unrealistic career images?. Of course, the article makes light of the lack of women in leadership roles.
“[Barbie] furthers the myth that if a woman works hard and sticks to her guns, she can rise to the top,” the article read. “Our young girls need to learn to accept their career futures, not be set up with ridiculously unattainable images.”
The issue was apparently first brought to national attention when a mother found her five-year-old daughter “playing CEO” with her doll.
“Women don’t run companies,” the article joked. “Typically, those with talent, charisma, and luck work behind the scenes to bring a man’s vision to light. Real women in today’s work force don’t have Barbie’s dream corner office. More often than not, they have cubicles or Dream Kitchens. I mean, what’s next Accepted by her male peers Polly Pocket “
Sure, it’s a spoof, but it’s not exactly the type of message you want linked to the first CEO image of a woman.
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Several more all-male rows later, five to be exact, the first flesh-and-blood woman is revealed. Debbie Cavalier is CEO for Berklee Online and vice president of Berklee College of Music.
“The world needs more women CEOs,” said Cavalier, “there is no doubt about that.”
But Cavalier doesn’t fault Barbie. “I’m a huge fan of Barbie and think Mattel has done a good job providing myriad positive ‘role-model Barbies’ that convey women can do and be anything,” she said. As long as she’s “wearing CEO clothes” and not “bathing suits by the Barbie dream house pool”.
There’s more wrong to Google’s search algorithm than first meets the eye. The company uses different image categories for each gender. When you expand the search to male CEO?, the categories include chief executive officer and “office . In comparison, for women they include outfit and attire .
A study made by researchers of the University of Washington, “Unequal representation and gender stereotypes in image search results for occupations“, found evidence of stereotype exaggeration andunder-representationof women when comparing actual employment data to image search results, based on a study of the top 100 Google search results for 45 different occupations.
The research compared the percentages of women who appeared in the top 100 Google image search results for different occupations with the previous year’s employment statistics to find out how many women actually worked in that field.
Shockingly, when the occupation matched the statistics, the images that appeared were professional-looking. However, when searching for stereotypical male jobs, the images tended to be more provocative and inappropriate.
“A number of the top hits depicting women as construction workers are models in skimpy little costumes with a hard hat posing suggestively on a jackhammer. You get things that nobody would take as professional,” said co-author Cynthia Matuszek, an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at University of Maryland.
Read more about how image search results affect our perception.
More importantly, researchers tried to find out whether the gender biases in image search results affected how people perceived those occupations. The answer was yes.
Volunteers were asked a series of questions about a particular job, including how many men and women worked in that field. Two weeks later, the researchers showed them a set of manipulated search image results and asked the same questions.
This shifted their estimates, accounting for seven per cent of second opinions.
The results prompted the researchers to question whether image search algorithms should be changed.
“Our hope is that this will become a question that designers of search engines might actually ask,” said Sean Munson, a professor of human-centered design and engineering. “They may come to a range of conclusions, but I would feel better if people are at least aware of the consequences and are making conscious choices around them.”
Read more about gender equality:
- Infinity and beyond: A look into the lives of space heroines reveals unchanged gender bias
- Quest to find most inspiring female business leaders in the UK today
- Shoot me now feminists – but I am so terribly bored of this gender equality lark
Matuszek, however, explained that Google wasn’t solely to blame for the search results.
Its part of a cycle: How people perceive things affects the search results, which affect how people perceive things,” she said. Matuszek recalled a robotics lecture where a male colleague illustrated researchers in his presentation as all guys, classic nerds . The caretaker was a plump woman in her 30s who was wearing a pink suit”.
With this in mind, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, teamed up with image providers to create 2,500 images of female leadership in contemporary work and life. This included a woman shaving her face, and another trying to saw off a man’s head.
According to Pam Grossman, Getty’s director of visual trends, it was all a effort to combat viral examples such as “Women laughing alone with salad“.
“Images can influence the way we perceive each other,” Grossman said, “and, frankly, the way we perceive ourselves.”
Matuszek highlighted thatGoogle search results weren’t the real problem. The changes in behaviour found in people after her research suggested an unconscious bias.
The takeaway isnt that we should change the way search works,” she said. “This kind of thing could tie into whether someone gets hired for something. You could see a female engineer in a job interview and think she looks less competent.”
You should question why.
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