Study shows that Google's ads search results has discrimination based on the searcher's gender. Carnegie Mellon University conducted tests on how an online user's interaction and behavior affects on how ads are being displayed.
Based on the study conducted by Carnegie Mellon, male users are likely to get more high paying job results than female. Carnegie Mellon said it is hard to identify the cause of the findings due to limitations of their visibility into the ad system. These includes advertisers,websites, Google and users.
According to PC, it is possible that the discrimination is based on advertiser's targeting preferences and not embedded in Google's algorithm. On the test, Carnegie Mellon developed a sophisticated tool called Adfisher. This tool determines the use of information in advertising algorithms and personalised ad setting such as Google Ad settings.
Adfisher ran several experiments involving user profiles. There were 1000 simulated users in the gender testing, half were male and half female. Each profile was reported visiting the top 100 job sites and more than 600,000 ads were reviewed.
Results show that male profiles received ads with $200,000 jobs six times than female profiles. There were lots of findings on the said research, but this gender-based results have captured the most attention and discussion, Marketing Land.
The said study can not point out any policies or laws that may have been broken by Google. It is not clear and can not be explained by Science why such result happens given that Google allows every user and advertisers have the same policy. It is not fair to blame Google for the unintentional algorithm result without any clear evidence.