research-article

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

Authors:

Jahna Otterbacher,

Paul CloughAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 6620 - 6631

https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025727

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

There is much concern about algorithms that underlie information services and the view of the world they present. We develop a novel method for examining the content and strength of gender stereotypes in image search, inspired by the trait adjective checklist method. We compare 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.

References

[1]

Colin Allen, Wendell Wallach, and Iva Smit. 2006. Why machine ethics? IEEE Intelligent Systems 21, 4, 12--17.

Digital Library

[2]

Andrea E. Abele and Susanne Bruckm�ller. 2011. The bigger one of the "Big Two"? Preferential processing of communal information. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47, 935--948.

[3]

Andrea E. Abele, Mirjam Uchronski, Caterina Suitner, and Bogdan Wojciszke. 2008. Towards an operationalization of the fundamental dimensions of agency and communion: Trait content ratings in five countries considering valence and frequency of word occurrence. European Journal of Social Psychology 38, 1202--1217.

[4]

Leif Azzopardi and Vishwa Vinay. 2008. Retrievability: an evaluation measure for higher order information access tasks. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management (CIKM '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 561--570.

Digital Library

[5]

Paul Baker and Amanda Potts. 2013. "Why do White People have Thin Lips?" Google and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes via Auto-complete Search Forms. Critical Discourse Studies 10, 2: 187--204.

[6]

S. A. Basow. 1986. Gender Stereotypes: Traditions and Alternatives. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

[7]

Michelle C. Bligh, Michele M. Schlehofer, Bettina J. Casad, and Amber M. Gaffney. 2012. Competent enough, but would you vote for her? Gender stereotypes and media influences on perceptions of women politicians. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 42, 3: 560--597.

[8]

Engin Bozdag. 2013. Bias in algorithmic filtering and personalization. Ethics and Information Technology 15, 3: 209--227.

Digital Library

[9]

Amy J. Cuddy, Susan T. Fiske, and Peter Glick. 2008. Warmth and competence as universal dimensions of social perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS Map. Advances in Experimental Psychology 40, 61--149.

[10]

Anupam Datta, Shayak Sen and Yair Zick. 2016. Algorithmic transparency via quantitative input influence. Proceedings of the 37th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, 598617.

[11]

Nicholas Diakopoulos. 2015. Algorithmic accountability: Journalistic investigation of computational power structures. Digital Journalism 3, 3: 398--415.

[12]

Amanda B. Diekman and Alice H. Eagly. 2000. Stereotypes as dynamic constructs: Women and men of the past, present and future. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26, 10, 1171--1188.

[13]

Alice H. Eagly, and Steven J. Karau. 2002. Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological review 109, 3, 573--598.

[14]

Motahhare Eslami, Aimee Rickman, Kristen Vaccaro, Amirhossein Aleyasen, Andy Vuong, Karrie Karahalios, Kevin Hamilton, and Christian Sandvig. 2015. "I always assumed that I wasn't really that close to {her}": Reasoning about Invisible Algorithms in News Feeds. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 153--162.

Digital Library

[15]

Randi Ettner and Antonio Guillamon. 2016. Theories of the Etiology of Transgender Identity. In R. Ettner, S. Monstrey, and E. Coleman (eds.), Principles of Transgender Medicine and Surgery (pp. 3--15). New York: Routledge.

[16]

Brian S. Everitt and Torsten Hothorn. 2009. Statistical Analysis Using R. Chapman and Hall / CRC.

[17]

Susan T. Fiske, Amy J. C. Cuddy, Peter Glick, and Jun Xu. 2002. A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82, 6, 878--902.

[18]

Batya Friedman and Helen Nissenbaum. 1996. Bias in computer systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) 14, 3: 330--347.

Digital Library

[19]

G.M. Gilbert. 1951. Stereotype persistence and change among college students. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 46, 245--254.

[20]

Tarleton Gillespie. 2014. The Relevance of Algorithms. Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society: 167.

[21]

Ayşe Göker, Richard Butterworth, Andrew MacFarlane, Tana Ahmed, and Simone Stumpf. 2016. Expeditions through image jungles: the commercial use of image libraries in an online environment. Journal of Documentation 72,1, 5--23.

[22]

David L. Hamilton and Tina K. Trolier. 1986. Stereotypes and stereotyping: An overview of the cognitive approach. In J. Dovidio and S. L. Gaertner (eds.), Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism (pp. 127--163). New York: Academic Press.

[23]

Aniko Hannak, Piotr Sapiezynski, Arash Molavi Kakhki, Balachander Krishnamurthy, David Lazer, Alan Mislove, and Christo Wilson. 2013. Measuring personalization of web search. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web, pp. 527--538. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.

Digital Library

[24]

Marvin Karlins, Thomas L. Coffman and Gary Walters. 1969. On the fading of social stereotypes: Studies in three generations of college students. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 13, 1--16.

[25]

Daniel Katz and Kenneth Braly. 1933. Racial stereotypes of one hundred college students. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 28, 3, 280--290.

[26]

Matthew Kay, Cynthia Matuszek, and Sean A. Munson. 2015. Unequal Representation and Gender Stereotypes in Image Search Results for Occupations. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3819--3828.

Digital Library

[27]

Elena Konkova, Andrew MacFarlane and Ayşe Göker. 2016. Analysing creative image search information needs. Knowledge Organization 43, 1: 13--21.

[28]

John D. Lee and Katrina A. See. 2004. Trust in Automation: Designing for Appropriate Reliance. Human Factors 46, 1 (Spring 2004): 50--80.

[29]

John Ludbrook. 1998. Multiple comparison procedures updated. Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology, 25, 12, 1032--1037.

[30]

Stephanie Madon, Max Guyll, Kathy Aboufadel, Eulices Montiel, Alison Smith, Polly Palumbo, and Lee Jussim. 2001. Ethnic and national stereotypes: The Princeton Trilogy revisited and revised. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27, 8, 996--1010.

[31]

Lori McCay-Peet and Elaine Toms. 2009. Image use within the work task model: Images as information and illustration. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 60, 12 (December 2009), 2416--2429.

Digital Library

[32]

Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, Julie E. Phelan, and Laurie A. Rudman. 2010. When men break the gender rules: Status incongruity and backlash against modest men. Psychology of Men & Masculinity 11, 2: 140--151.

[33]

Michael Mudrick. 2015. Pervasively offside: A gendered analysis of sportscasting. Doctoral dissertation, Paper 722. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/772

[34]

Clifford Nass and Youngme Moon. 2000. Machines and mindlessness: Social responses to computers. Journal of Social Issues 56, 1, 81--103.

[35]

Safiya Umoja Noble. 2012. Missed connections: What search engines say about women. Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture 54 (Spring 2012), 37--41.

[36]

Jahna Otterbacher. 2015. Crowdsourcing Stereotypes: Linguistic Bias in Metadata Generated via GWAP. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1955--1964.

Digital Library

[37]

Bing Pan, Helene Hembrooke, Thorsten Joachims, Lori Lorigo, Geri Gay, and Laura Granka. 2007. In Google We Trust: Users' Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 12, 3: 801--823.

[38]

James W. Pennebaker, Ryan L. Boyd, Kayla Jordan, and Kate Blackburn. 2015. The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2015. https://utexasir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2152/31333/LIWC2015_LanguageManual.pdf'sequence=3

[39]

Emilee Rader and Rebecca Gray. 2015. Understanding User Beliefs About Algorithmic Curation in the Facebook News Feed. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 173--182.

Digital Library

[40]

Laurie A. Rudman and Peter Glick. 2001. Prescriptive gender stereotypes and backlash toward agentic women. Journal of Social Issues 57, 4, 743--762.

[41]

Laurie A. Rudman and Julie E. Phelan. 2008. Backlash effects for disconfirming gender stereotypes in organizations. Organizational Behavior 28, 61--79.

[42]

Stefanie Simon and Crystal L. Hoyt. 2012. Exploring the effect of media images on women's leadership self-perceptions and aspirations. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 16, 2, 232--245.

[43]

Charlotte Templin. 1999. Hillary Clinton as threat to gender norms: Cartoon images of the first lady. Journal of Communication Inquiry 23, 1, 20--36.

[44]

Myriam C. Traub, Thaer Samar, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Jiyin He, Argen de Vries, and Lynda Hardman. 2016. Querylog-based assessment of retrievability bias in a large newspaper corpus. In Proccedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '16), ACM, Newark, NJ, 7--16.

Digital Library

[45]

Sherry Turkle. 1997. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster. Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Gender & society 1.2, 125--151.

[46]

Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing gender. Gender & society 1.2, 125--151.

Cited By

Gallo MHausladen CHsu MJenkins AOna VCamerer C(2024)Perceived warmth and competence predict callback rates in meta-analyzed North American labor market experimentsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.030472319:7(e0304723)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304723
Pradel F(2024)Influence of hate speech about refugees in search algorithms on political attitudes: An online experimentNew Media & Society10.1177/14614448241244735Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241244735
Greene MBalas BLescroart MMacNeilage PHart JBinaee KHausamann PMezile RShankar BSinnott CCapurro KHalow SHowe HJosyula MLi AMieses AMohamed ANudnou IParkhill ERiley PSchmidt BShinkle MSi WSzekely BTorres JWeissmann E(2024)The visual experience dataset: Over 200 recorded hours of integrated eye movement, odometry, and egocentric videoJournal of Vision10.1167/jov.24.11.624:11(6)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.24.11.6
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Competent Men and Warm Women: Gender Stereotypes and Backlash in Image Search Results
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

The Influence of Gender-Ethnic Intersectionality on Gender Stereotypes about IT Skills and Knowledge

One line of investigation in attempting to better understand the gender imbalance in the information technology (IT) field is to examine gender stereotypes about the skills and knowledge in the IT profession. A survey of 4046 university students in the ...
See feminine - Think incompetent? The effects of a feminine outfit on the evaluation of women's computer competence

According to common gender stereotypes, women are assumed to have lower computer skills than men. Following the interactive model of Deaux and Major (1987), target attributes or situational cues can activate stereotypes. Can the outfit of a woman elicit ...
Collaborative Learning Eliminates the Negative Impact of Gender Stereotypes on Women's Self-Concept (Abstract Only)
SIGCSE '16: Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education

Cultural stereotypes about women's "fit" and ability in technical fields, like computing, are alive and well. These cultural beliefs can make their way into women's personal belief system. When this happens, women's self-conceptions in computing suffer, ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 2017

7138 pages

ISBN:9781450346559

DOI:10.1145/3025453

General Chairs:
Gloria Mark
University of California Irvine
,
Susan Fussell
Cornell University
,
Program Chairs:
Cliff Lampe
University of Michigan
,
m.c. schraefel
University of Southampton
,
Juan Pablo Hourcade
University of Iowa
,
Caroline Appert
Universit� Paris-Sud
,
Daniel Wigdor
University of Toronto

Copyright � 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 May 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CHI '17

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '17: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 6 - 11, 2017

Colorado, Denver, USA

Acceptance Rates

CHI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 600 of 2,400 submissions, 25%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

77
Total Citations
View Citations
1,688
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)268
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)38

Reflects downloads up to 16 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Gallo MHausladen CHsu MJenkins AOna VCamerer C(2024)Perceived warmth and competence predict callback rates in meta-analyzed North American labor market experimentsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.030472319:7(e0304723)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304723
Pradel F(2024)Influence of hate speech about refugees in search algorithms on political attitudes: An online experimentNew Media & Society10.1177/14614448241244735Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241244735
Greene MBalas BLescroart MMacNeilage PHart JBinaee KHausamann PMezile RShankar BSinnott CCapurro KHalow SHowe HJosyula MLi AMieses AMohamed ANudnou IParkhill ERiley PSchmidt BShinkle MSi WSzekely BTorres JWeissmann E(2024)The visual experience dataset: Over 200 recorded hours of integrated eye movement, odometry, and egocentric videoJournal of Vision10.1167/jov.24.11.624:11(6)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.24.11.6
Zhang ZMoradzadeh SGui XKou Y(2024)Harmful Design in User-Generated Games and its Ethical and Governance Challenges: An Investigation of Design Co-Ideation of Game Creators on RobloxProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36770768:CHI PLAY(1-31)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677076
Rashik MJasim MKucher KSarvghad AMahyar N(2024)Beyond Text and Speech in Conversational Agents: Mapping the Design Space of AvatarsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661563(1875-1894)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661563
Bink MElsweiler D(2024)Balancing Act: Boosting Strategies for Informed Search on Controversial TopicsProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638329(254-265)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627508.3638329
Gleason JGhosh ARobertson RWilson CChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(2024)Perceptions in Pixels: Analyzing Perceived Gender and Skin Tone in Real-world Image Search ResultsProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645666(1249-1259)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589334.3645666
Kaur AKanwal NKumar MSingh N(2024)Gender Detection in Video Streams: A Deep Learning Approach for Ethical and Practical Applications2024 3rd International Conference for Innovation in Technology (INOCON)10.1109/INOCON60754.2024.10511733(1-5)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INOCON60754.2024.10511733
Romero-Dom�nguez LSixto-Costoya AFerrer-Sapena A(2024)Exploring stereotypes, bias, and expectations of women in the open data contextGender, Technology and Development10.1080/09718524.2024.235410328:2(245-264)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/09718524.2024.2354103
Kim SOh PLee J(2024)Algorithmic gender bias: investigating perceptions of discrimination in automated decision-makingBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2024.2306484(1-14)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2024.2306484
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents