Gender discrimination in the workplace has been an issue for as long as we can remember and this professional discrepancy has had a dramatic impact on the way wages are distributed. Despite being more widely acknowledged in governmental action, the gender employment and gender wage gaps don’t seem to be showing many signs of closing and Google’s preferential treatment of male job seekers certainly isn’t helping towards efforts.
New investigations undertaken by US University, Carnegie Mellon has revealed that search engine giant, Google largely favours males when targeting their job advertisements on third party
websites. Its research was taken with help from associate professor of computer science, Anupam Datta, who assisted in the creation of its AdFisher technology. AdFisher is an automated testing rig, which was used to explore Google’s process of ad targeting.
The female of the species is less privileged than the male
AdFisher was used to virtually impersonate both male and female job seekers by creating 17,370 new profiles, which were then used to visit various job sites. The technology allowed Carnegie Mellon to analyse 600,000 adverts and what they found was pretty shocking. The results demonstrated that female job seekers were far less likely to be shown high-paid vacancies in comparison to their male counterparts.
To be more specific, the results revealed that Google showed ads for career coaching for $200,000 executive jobs 1,852 times to male users but a mere 318 to females. Some might argue that this discrepancy, despite being unarguably massive, was justified because Google uses unique user data, such as browsing history, to target its adverts and perhaps females just weren’t looking for highly paid positions.
Who’s to blame?
However, what the researchers at Carnegie Mellon were keen to point was that this investigation was done using freshly made profiles that had no previous browsing history or existing data that could have influenced the search engine. Datta suggested that these findings imply that gender discrimination is actually engrained in the process but also explained that it is difficult to pinpoint the responsibility for this.
Datta outlined that it was hard to distinguish between advertiser preferences and unintentional consequences of influential algorithms which drive online recommendation engines. Other researchers also cited Google’s complex profiling systems and the way in which advertisers buy and target their ads via the search engine as being additional reasons as to why laying blame would be tricky.
Gender discrimination in the workplace is still rife it seems
The Make or Break: The UK’s Digital Future report issued by the House of Lords earlier this year highlighted a need to recognise the economic potential of women more, especially in the digital sector. The report claimed that: “women are not choosing digital and science and technology career paths or subjects at school […] partly because these careers are seen as ‘boys’ club’”, suggesting that gender discrimination is instilled even at the very first steps of the formidable career ladder.
Also earlier this year, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) released figures that revealed the difference in earning between men and women has barely altered in the past two decades. Women are earning just 77% of what men are earning and this is a figure that has risen by a mere 3% over the past 20 years. Delving deeper, research also revealed that the ‘motherhood pay gap’ means mothers with two children will receive 25% less payment when they return to work than childless women. What is perhaps even more shocking is that the situation is turned on its head for male employees, with working fathers receiving 11% more in payment than childless man.
In its report, the ILO warned that the situation will remain very much the same for the next 70 years if some drastic action isn’t taken to try and close the gaping gender pay gap and discriminative advertising certainly isn’t do much to help speed up efforts. Not only is gender discrimination still rife in the workplace itself, it also seems to be rearing its ugly head in the job search process now too.
Help could be on its way for the gender pay gap though
This week the government announced a new regulation that will require large British companies to reveal whether or not they are paying male employees more than female members of staff. If so, businesses will then also have to prove by how much more male workers are being paid in comparison to their female counterparts.
This regulation will apply to companies with 250 or more employees and will come into fruition during the first half of next year. Cameron is implementing this process to better establish and deal with the gender pay gap between average female earnings and average male earnings. The prime minster claims that the move “will cast sunlight on the discrepancies and create the pressure we need for change, driving women’s wages up.”