Event Date
- Time: 12-1PM, February 22, 2024
- Location: Kerr Hall 386, UC Davis
- Zoom: 974 4807 7707
Online Images Amplify Gender Bias
Douglas Guilbeault
Abstract: Each year, people spend less time reading and more time viewing images, which are skyrocketing in their prevalence online. Images from platforms like Google and Wikipedia are downloaded by millions every day, and digital advertisers are increasingly harnessing images to capture attention. Here, we show that the proliferation of images online may significantly exacerbate gender bias. Unlike text, which can readily minimize bias via gender-neutral terminology, images of people inherently convey demographic information, amplifying the presence of gender in the depiction of social categories. People also process images more quickly, implicitly, and memorably than text, suggesting images may be stronger at reinforcing gender bias in people’s beliefs. In this study, we develop computational and experimental techniques for comparing gender bias and its psychological impact across images and texts. We examine the gender associations of 3,495 social categories in over one million images from Google, Wikipedia, and IMDb, as well as in billions of words from these platforms. We find that gender bias is more prevalent in images than text for both female- and male-typed categories. We further show that the documented underrepresentation of women online is substantially worse in images compared to not only text, but also public opinion and US census data. A nationally representative, pre-registered experiment finds that repeatedly googling for images rather than textual descriptions of occupations amplifies gender bias in participants’ explicit and implicit beliefs about these occupations, an effect which lasts for several days.
Bio: Douglas Guilbeault is an Assistant Professor at the Haas School of Business and a co-director of the Computational Culture Lab. He studies how ideas and behaviors rise and spread through social networks, as well as how these dynamics are shaped by organizational culture, artificial intelligence, and social media. His work has appeared in top journals, including Nature, The PNAS, and Management Science, as well as in popular news outlets, such as The Atlantic and The Harvard Business Review. He has received awards from The International Conference on Computational Social Science, The Cognitive Science Society, and The International Communication Association.
The series: The Department of Communication Brown Bag Series is a regular meeting for developments in Communication and related disciplines, hosted by the UC Davis Department of Communication. It is held at noon on most Thursdays during the academic year.