Unconscious bias IRL
This clip is a few years old now, but sums up just how the bias we see online reverberates in the real world.
It’s of British tennis star Andy Murray, who steps in when a reporter describes US player Sam Querrey as being “the first US player to reach a semi-final since 2009”.
It’s actually Serena Williams. She’s won 12 Grand Slam singles tournaments since 2009.
People at the time called it ‘casual sexism’. A lot of people wouldn’t even be conscious that they were making a mistake.
That’s where the internet can both help - and hinder - progress towards gender equality.
How search works
When you punch a question into a search engine, where does that answer really come from?
We asked the Vice President of Search at Google, Pandu Nayak, to help us out.
He encouraged us to think of a search engine like the index in the back of a book. But obviously storing a LOT more information than a book ever could…
It wouldn’t be possible for humans to sift through all that information, that’s why bits of computer code called ‘algorithms’ do it for us.
The algorithms rank how helpful the information is to answer the question we’re asking, based on several factors. Then the highest ranked results appear at the top of the web page.
Trouble is, this process doesn’t always surface the correct information, and favours some content over others - this is known as ‘search bias’.
If that explanation was too brief for you, you can read more from that interview here.
Can we ‘correct’ the internet?
Rebecca Sowden is a former international soccer player, who represented New Zealand.
She might’ve retired from soccer, but is a self-described women’s sport advocate. When she started searching for match times online, she found herself struggling to find the women’s schedules.
Before she knew it, she had teamed up with other like-minded people to launch a global campaign, raising awareness about the gender bias that occurs on the internet against sportswomen - and how to fix it.
The ‘why’ of the whole campaign is summed up perfectly in their launch video.
Rebecca and the team have travelled to various countries spreading the word, since their launch earlier this year. ‘Correct the Internet’ is now backed by the United Nations, and has been raised in UK Parliament. Billie Jean King even called it her ‘new favourite campaign’.
“Making sure female athletes take their rightful place on the Internet”
So what’s the plan to ‘correct’ the internet? It’s kind of a sandwich approach. Talking to the search engines themselves, raising awareness of the problem, and getting sports stars like Billie Jean King and Andy Murray to share the initiative.
But there’s also something we can do to help.
“The great thing is that as people, we have written our inherent bias into the likes of search engines and the Internet. The great thing is we can also reverse it” - Rebecca Sowden, Correct the Internet
The team at Correct the Internet have created an online tool that you can use to help correct inaccurate search results.
Or you can do it directly in the search engine. Here’s how...
1) Type into Google ‘who has won the most cricket world cup titles?'
2) Go to ‘Quick Settings’ in the top-right corner
3) Select 'send feedback'.
4) Write your feedback in the box, and hit ‘send’. You can type your own text in the box.
“Fuelling a system of under-representation”
This is the heart of why it all matters. Because what we learn from search engines doesn’t exist in a vacuum - it reverberates in our everyday lives. And that’s why the team at Correct the Internet want permanent change.
But they’ve come up against a recent challenge. Some of the searches they were seeing ‘corrected’ earlier this year have started reverting back to the original, incorrect answers.
Rebecca tells me they don’t really know why the answers are reverting back - or how to fix this.
“We’re on a mission to get the Googles, the Bings, the Yahoos, whoever it might be, to actually help us with their systems and infrastructure and create permanent change" - Rebecca Sowden, Correct the Internet
We reached out to Google about why search results might change over time. They referred us to their 'How Search Works' resource, and reminded us that web results will change over time depending on who is writing the content, and who is reading it.
Where next?
There are definitely signs things are heading in the right direction. For example, Google announced during this year’s Women’s World Cup that they were making it easier to find search results on women’s sport. You can read our piece about the changes Google were planning here.
But there’s no one easy fix. And the scale of the problem is huge. As the Vice President of Search at Google reminded us, there’s trillions of pages on the web, and 15% of Google searches are new every single day.
Rebecca also reminds us of the unknowns of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and whether it might perpetuate the gender biases that already exist in search.
“While it might not seem like a big deal, it has these bigger consequences that can be amplified across all of society” - Rebecca Sowden, Correct the Internet
You can read more about Correct the Internet by heading to their website. And if you want more on how search engines work, you can watch our interview with the Vice President of Search, Pandu Nayak, on YouTube.