Do Google's 'unprofessional hair' results show it is racist?
Search term brings back mainly results of black women, which some say is evidence of bias. But algorithms may just be reflecting the wider social landscape
Recently, an MBA student named Rosalia discovered something alarming : Googling “unprofessional hairstyles for work” yielded image results mainly of black women with natural hair, while searching for the “professional” ones offered pictures of coiffed, white women. Often the hair styles themselves were not vastly different -- only the hair type and the wearer’s skin.
Rosalia’s tweet has since been retweeted thousands of times - more than 6,200 in the first 24 hours, she says - as her discovery sparked discussion on implicit racial biases against black people in the workplace. Can an algorithm itself be racist? Or is it only reflecting the wider social landscape?
It seems hard to remember a time when you couldn’t just “Google Images” a word or phrase and see a picture of it instantaneously. According to Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, the feature was introduced in the year 2000 . It was in response to sudden, overwhelming demand: Jennifer Lopez famously wore a plummeting, green Versace gown to that year’s Grammy awards and suddenly everyone wanted to see it.
Now, Google Images is a practically thoughtless part of the way we use the web, instantaneously offering us a vast gallery of relevant images in response to a single word, phrase or query. It also makes further suggestions. If you search pie, you’ll see classic confections both whole and sliced, as well as some available subsets.
On a basic level, Google Images primarily figures out who or what is shown in a picture by judging the text and captions that surround it. It’s possible though that some rudimentary image analysis - the kind that can tell a face from a landscape - is also involved. In the case of the great hair debate, Google Images seems to have taken many of the pictures of black women wearing the “unprofessional” hairstyles were from blogs, articles and Pinterest boards. Many of these are by people of colour explicitly discussing and protesting against racist attitudes to hair. One image leads to a post criticising Hampton University’s ban on dreadlocks and cornrows; another was linked with a post celebrating natural hair and the “ridiculous” pressure to straighten it for the office; here’s a rejection of the idea that big, natural curls are “distracting” in a newsroom.