Do we know if Google or tech in general hires black women less than proportional to the US population?
Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
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Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#12Back in the 90s, search engines were notorious for serving back lots of porn links interspersed with whatever thing you were looking for. I was unusual (apparently) in that my searches tended to be really specific and I rarely got a lot of porn results. Except one time. I was looking for information on gun violence in Europe and I was getting back not just a few porn results, but lots and lots of them. I was using re…
This is because marketing weasels had just discovered the hottest new tech of the day: meta tags. And immediately set about polluting them. At one point in the mid 90s about half the web that existed at the time was tagged “Anna Kournikova naked”.
(Probably many on HN are too young to remember her... imagine Taylor Swift x10, that was her popularity back then)
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#13Try searching Google Images for "brazilian".
Her point is quite valid, and also well recognized in at least some part of the tech industry: when you "blindly" optimize for a certain audience, you risk picking up the biases of that audience.
So, if you want to appeal to a broader audience than your current one, you might need to manually tune your system to remove some of the biases from your original audience.
This is particularly important, if not from a human perspective, at least from a business perspective, when the bias of your current audience is about the larger audience.
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#14I like the underlying question that the author brings up - what's google algorithm, and who's responsible for it?
In the old days it was "most linked page with those keywords," right? So if you searched "gay man" and got a bunch of gay porn, is it necessarily google's fault that the internet is more gay porn that it is resources for gay men to discuss LGBT issues? Is it google's fault that news agencies more typically report on crime by black people than white (or that black people are more likely to be convinced/arrested in the first place?)
I think Google is responsible in 2018, now that they offer extremely tailored results. Duckduckgo, maybe not. But if Google is going to say "we're going to show you listings for restaurants in SF in your simple 'restaurants' search because we know you live in SF," I think they should also say "we're going to show you results for LGBT resources when you search for 'gay men' because nothing about your query indicates a desire for pornographic content."
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#15Several of the searches given as examples of racial bias are already in a feedback loop; if everyone on the Internet starts writing articles saying 'OMG search for unprofessional hairstyles for work and look racism' then it shouldn't come as a surprise that the first results for otherwise innocuous phrases become skewed, and removing this so-called bias actually requires direct intervention.
Although if one actually compares the results for [un]professional hairstyles for work there doesn't seem to be any negative bias; black people are well-represented in both result sets.
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#16Do we know if Google or tech in general hires black women less than proportional to the US population?
Blacks and females are less represented in Google's (and most of tech) workforce, I don't recall seeing specific numbers for black females, but it is trivial to conclude that.
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#17Um, it's not "Google", it's "the content of the internet" that's biased - right?
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#18Google search results reflect what's in use on the web via PageRank and modern PageRank-like approximations. Google and its human staff does not apply human intellect to the problem of sorting, picking, and ranking each search result. Moreover, Google has included "Safe Search" features for several years that would remove these types of results from search.
Before we condemn Google for the collective actions of the broader Internet community of websites, we should take a moment to understand this point.
Now, it is possible to create a search engine curated by humans or filters that remove objectionable content, and perhaps that approach might be desirable to some - a "MyGoogle" experience with search results customized based on Google's interpretation (or explicit settings) of the visitor's demographics, political beliefs, trigger words, and purchase history.
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#19Try searching Google Images for "brazilian". Her point is quite valid, and also well recognized in at least some part of the tech industry: when you "blindly" optimize for a certain audience, you risk picking up the biases of that audience. So, if you want to appeal to a broader audience than your current one, you might need to manually tune your system to remove some of the biases from your original audience. This i…
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Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#20I like the underlying question that the author brings up - what's google algorithm, and who's responsible for it? In the old days it was "most linked page with those keywords," right? So if you searched "gay man" and got a bunch of gay porn, is it necessarily google's fault that the internet is more gay porn that it is resources for gay men to discuss LGBT issues? Is it google's fault that news agencies more typicall…
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