We love Google. And, as a marketer and tech-savvy professional, I can’t live without asking Google everything that crosses my mind. I know, the internet is not always the best source of information — but it’s so fast and easy that it is almost impossible not to use it.
The problem is when we get too comfortable with the single info of our SERP without double-checking the information. We read what an algorithm thinks is useful for us. As a consequence, we become more prone to fall into implicit bias, half-truths, or misinformation.
What is an implicit bias?
According to perception.org, implicit bias describes attitudes toward people or associates stereotypes without being completely conscious of it. Some examples of it are associating criminality with black people or weakness with femininity without noticing it.
Those biases can be positive or negative and can come from any kind of person. However, individuals are more than stereotypes, and sometimes telephonelists.biz they don’t reflect the nuances of being human.
It is necessary to highlight that gender. Is not the only thing that can trigger an unconscious bias. Other can include:
Race
Religion
Political ideology
Age
Social classes
Nationality
And yeah, we can see how stereotypes are affecting Marketing efforts, even nowadays. Let’s dive into that.
What do Search Engines have to do in this issue?
Among all of these, the author speaks about how Google has a history of racism. In a brief example, she showed the results appearing when BW Lists you type “professional hairstyle” related to white women with straight hair and the “unprofessional hairstyle” related to Afro or black women.
In recent research using word embeddings trained on massive internet text corpora, words representing the concept of “people” (e.g., “somebody” or “human”) were more likely to occur with terms for “men” than for “women”—a demonstration of the male-default bias collectively displayed across individuals in a society.
