'Husband' or 'wedding' was far more likely to come up as a Google auto-suggestion for the names of women journalists, Harvard professors, and Forbes' 30 Under 30 winners than 'wife' did for men.
But these marriage-related suggestions aren’t blatantly and offensively sexist — they’re just, well, mildly creepy and passively sexist. Not worth a takedown from Google. And while the suggestions are free of SEO-gaming algorithms, they are still the result of some form of machine learning, which is susceptible to bias. “It’s untenable to think that what shows up in search engines is the truth about someone,” said Noble.It’s possible that these auto-suggestions become self-fulfilling prophecies.
First, I needed to find out if what I was anecdotally seeing really was true. To test my theory, I tried three cohorts: married BuzzFeed News staff, Harvard history professors, and the 2019 Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in the health care category. I chose these groups because academics and 30 Under 30 winners are similar to journalists in the sense that they’re notfamous, but they do have a lot of Google results for their names.
The Harvard history department has 52 professors listed on its website — 29 men and 23 women. Four of 29 male professors had a suggestion of “spouse,” whereas 11 of 23 female professors did. That’s 13% of male professors and 47% of female professors. Of course, my experiment is not scientific or rigorous — it’s back of the envelope. There are a lot of factors not accounted for, like how many people are actually married, and the whole experiment implies cisgender heterosexuality — not to mention its small sample size. A real social scientist would never let this pass muster. But I’m not a scientist. I’m just a tech blogger, standing in front of some Google results, asking why this reeks of patriarchy.
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