CEO Barbie (Photo : Facebook)
Satire news organization The Onion once featured a fake "CEO" Barbie in 2005 and it remained as the only woman in the top of Google image search for the term "CEO".
Interestingly, the Barbie doll is the only female who appears in the top results. Among the men listed, including Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs, the vast majority are Whites.
The search engine Bing produces the same result, according to PC World. In fairness, the companies' algorithms produce those results because the majority of the top websites list "CEO" images of men.
The Barbie search engine result is mentioned in a new study by the University of Washington (UW), whose results were published on Thursday. It suggests that the way Google's image searches represent genders can alter users' "worldviews."
The study evaluated gender representations for 45 different occupations. About 50 percent of the professions included in the image searchers were within five percentage points of the real-life split of genders.
Still, the UW study concluded that women were greatly underrepresented in many occupations, such as CEOs. While 27 percent of US CEOs are women, but only 11 percent of image searches were women, according to The Week.
Meanwhile, women were actually over-represented in the image search for "telemarketer." The industry has an approximate 50-50 split among genders.
Sean Munson, co-author of the study, hopes that search engine designers will consider the topic of his team's research. He wants them to be aware of the "consequences" of the study's results.
Mattel, Inc. launched the Barbie fashion doll in 1959. Ruth Handler, an American businessman, created the doll that was inspired by the German doll named Bild Lilli.
