A new AI study out Wednesday in the journal Nature from the University of California, Berkeley found that women are systematically presented as younger than men online and and by artificial intelligence—based on an analysis of 1.4 million online images and videos, plus nine large language models trained on billions of words.
Researchers looked at content from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr, and YouTube, and major large language models including GPT2, and found women consistently appeared younger than men—across 3,495 occupational and social categories. (Note: It’s possible that filters on videos and women’s makeup may be adding to this age-related gender bias in visual content.)
Study data showed not only are women asystematically portrayed as younger than men across online platforms, but this distortion is strongest for content depicting occupations with higher status and earnings, It also found that Googling images of occupations amplified age-related gender bias in participants’ beliefs and hiring preferences.
“This kind of age-related gender bias has been seen in other studies of specific industries, and anecdotally… but no one has previously been able to examine this at such scale,” said Berkeley Haas assistant professor Solène Delecourt who co-authored the study along with Douglas Guilbeault, from Stanford’s business school, and Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan from Oxford’s Autonomy Institute.
“Even though the internet is wrong, when it tells us this ‘fact’ about the world, we start believing it to be true,” Guilbeault said. “It brings us deeper into bias and error.”
Algorithms amplify age-gender bias
Looking specifically at ChatGPT, researchers found when the AI chatbot generated and analyzed some 40,000 resumes, it assumed women were younger by 1.6 years and had less work experience, while rating older male applicants as more qualified—even though the data shows no systematic age differences between men and women in the workforce.
AI and online perceptions can create a distorted feedback loop that spills out into the world
Perhaps the greatest takeaway from the study is that this distorted view online reinforces inaccuracies about and stereotypes of women, that can end up creating a feedback loop that moves from the internet into the real world, which can result in widening the gap between men and women in the job market.