(Press-News.org) Getty Images last year created a new online image catalog of women in the workplace - one that countered visual stereotypes on the Internet of moms as frazzled caregivers rather than powerful CEOs.
A new University of Washington study adds to those efforts by assessing how accurately gender representations in online image search results for 45 different occupations match reality.
In a few jobs -- including CEO -- women were significantly underrepresented in Google image search results, the study found, and that can change searchers' worldviews. Across all the professions, women were slightly underrepresented on average.
The study also answers a key question: Does the gender ratio in images that pop up when we type "author," "receptionist" or "chef" influence people's perceptions about how many men or women actually hold those jobs?
In a paper to be presented in April at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI 2015 conference in South Korea, researchers from the UW and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County found that manipulated image search results could determine, on average, 7 percent of a study participant's subsequent opinion about how many men and women work in a particular field, compared with earlier estimates.
"You need to know whether gender stereotyping in search image results actually shifts people's perceptions before you can say whether this is a problem. And, in fact, it does -- at least in the short term," said co-author Sean Munson, UW assistant professor of human centered design and engineering.
The study first compared the percentages of women who appeared in the top 100 Google image search results in July 2013 for different occupations -- from bartender to chemist to welder -- with 2012 U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics showing how many women actually worked in that field.
In some jobs, the discrepancies were pronounced, the study found. In a Google image search for CEO, 11 percent of the people depicted were women, compared with 27 percent of U.S. CEOs who are women.
Twenty-five percent of people depicted in image search results for authors are women, compared with 56 percent of actual U.S. authors.
By contrast, 64 percent of the telemarketers depicted in image search results were female, while that occupation is evenly split between men and women.
Yet for nearly half of the professions - such as nurse practitioner (86 percent women), engineer (13 percent women), and pharmacist (54 percent women) -- those two numbers were within five percentage points.
"I was actually surprised at how good the image search results were, just in terms of numbers," said co-author Matt Kay, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering. "They might slightly underrepresent women and they might slightly exaggerate gender stereotypes, but it's not going to be totally divorced from reality."
When the researchers asked people to rate the professionalism of the people depicted in top image search results, though, other inequities emerged. Images that showed a person matching the majority gender for a profession tended to be ranked by study participants as more competent, professional and trustworthy. They were also more likely to choose them to illustrate that profession in a hypothetical business presentation.
By contrast, the image search results depicting a person whose gender didn't match an occupational stereotype were more likely to be rated as provocative or 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, a former UW doctoral student who is now an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Most importantly, researchers wanted to explore whether gender biases in image search results actually affected how people perceived those occupations.
They asked study volunteers a series of questions about a particular job, including how many men and women worked in that field. Two weeks later, they showed them a set of manipulated search image results and asked the same questions.
Exposure to skewed image search results did shift their estimates slightly, accounting for 7 percent of those second opinions. The study did not test long-term changes in perception, but other research suggests that many small exposures to biased information over time can have a lasting effect on everything from personal preconceptions to hiring practices.
The measured effect raises interesting questions, the researchers say, about whether image search algorithms should be changed to help counter occupational stereotypes.
"Our hope is that this will become a question that designers of search engines might actually ask," Munson said. "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."
INFORMATION:
For more information, contact Munson, Kay and Matuszek at careerimagesearch@uw.edu.
PHOENIX, Ariz. -- April 9, 2015 -- Scientists at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), using state-of-the-art genetic technology, have discovered the likely cause of a child's rare type of severe muscle weakness.
The child was one of six cases in which TGen sequenced -- or decoded -- the genes of patients with Neuromuscular Disease (NMD) and was then able to identify the genetic source, or likely genetic source, of each child's symptoms, according to a study published April 8 in the journal Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine.
"In all six cases of ...
A family of proteins called G proteins are a recognized component of the communication system the human body uses to sense hormones and other chemicals in the bloodstream and to send messages to cells. In work that further illuminates how cells work, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered a new role for G proteins that may have relevance to halting solid tumor cancer metastasis.
The study is reported online April 9 in Developmental Cell.
"Our work provides the first direct evidence that G proteins are signaling on membranes ...
Bushfires are inevitable in the fire-prone landscapes of Western Australia. Long dry summers, vegetation and undergrowth, and ignition from lightning or human causes mean that bushfires can and do occur every summer.
A bushfire is an unplanned fire (in the U.S. this is referred to as a wildfire). Each year Australia's Department of Parks and Wildlife responds to more than 600 bushfires that occur on or near land managed by the department. Bushfires have many causes, some natural such as lightning and some as a result of human activity such as camp fires, escapes from ...
ATLANTA--A combination of mental practice and physical therapy is an effective treatment for people recovering from a stroke, according to researchers at Georgia State University.
The findings, published on March 30 in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, examine how the brains of stroke patients change after treatment.
Mental practice and physical therapy are interventions used to improve impaired motor movement, coordination and balance following stroke. Mental practice, also known as motor imagery, is the mental rehearsal of a motor action without an overt ...
URBANA, Ill. - Two University of Illinois food scientists have learned that understanding and manipulating porosity during food manufacturing can affect a food's health benefits.
Youngsoo Lee reports that controlling the number and size of pores in processed foods allows manufacturers to use less salt while satisfying consumers' taste buds. Pawan Takhar has found that meticulously managing pore pressure in foods during frying reduces oil uptake, which results in lower-fat snacks without sacrificing our predilection for fried foods' texture and taste.
Both scientists ...
BOSTON (April 9, 2015)- Making small, consistent changes to the types of protein- and carbohydrate-rich foods we eat may have a big impact on long-term weight gain, according to a new study led by researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University. The results were published on-line this week in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Based on more than 16 years of follow-up among 120,000 men and women from three long-term studies of U.S. health professionals, the authors first found that diets with a high glycemic load (GL) from ...
The one common element in recent weather has been oddness. The West Coast has been warm and parched; the East Coast has been cold and snowed under. Fish are swimming into new waters, and hungry seals are washing up on California beaches.
A long-lived patch of warm water off the West Coast, about 1 to 4 degrees Celsius (2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, is part of what's wreaking much of this mayhem, according to two University of Washington papers to appear in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
"In the fall of 2013 and ...
April 9, 2015 - A new University of Utah study is the first to provide clear insight into contributors to suicide risk among military personnel and veterans who have deployed.
The study, published today in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, found that exposure to killing and death while deployed is connected to suicide risk. Previous studies that looked solely at the relationship between deployment and suicide risk without assessing for exposure to killing and death have shown inconsistent results.
"Many people assume that deployment equals exposure ...
When black holes tango, one massive partner spins head over heels (or in this case heels over head) until the merger is complete, said researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology in a paper published in Physical Review Letters.
This spin dynamic may affect the growth of black holes surrounded by accretion disks and alter galactic and supermassive binary black holes, leading to observational effects, according to RIT scientists Carlos Lousto and James Healy.
The authors of the study will present their findings at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore ...
The RapidScat instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station (ISS) provided data about Tropical Cyclone Joalane's surface winds that showed how the strongest sustained winds consolidated as the tropical cyclone intensified and developed an eye. As of April 9, warnings were in effect at Rodrigues Island in the Southern Indian Ocean as Joalane approached.
RapidScat measured the surface winds within Tropical Cyclone Joalane late on April 7 and on April 8, revealing that the strongest winds consolidated over a 24 hour period. RapidScat measured Joalane's winds ...
