If narrowing the pay gap between men and women is an ongoing journey, a Carnegie Mellon University study may steer advocates in the direction of targeted online advertising.
Job seekers of equal qualifications were not given equal opportunities to view ads touting high-paying executive positions, according to the study of Google ads conducted by Anupam Datta, CMU associate professor of computer science, and Amit Datta, a Ph.D. student. And while the problem could be attributed to anything from machine-learning algorithms gone wild to outright discrimination on the part of employers, parties on all sides said it is hard to point out what went wrong.
Working with AdFisher, a tool developed out of CMU to conduct experiments with fake user profiles, the duo created 1,000 profiles and adjusted Google’s Ad Settings to make it appear that half of the fake profiles belonged to men and half belonged to women.
Then, each profile was directed toward the nation’s top 100 employment sites to examine what sorts of ads would follow.
Researchers noticed the ad most often shown to the male profiles was an ad for Warwick, R.I.-based executive career consulting firm The Barrett Group. Profiles associated with women most often saw ads from a generic job posting service and one from an automobile dealership.
Considering the Barrett Group ad sought to connect the male job seekers to executive positions paying more than $200,000 per year, researchers said potential implications for widespread discrimination through targeted advertising were apparent. Male profiles in the study saw the ad 1,800 times. Female profiles saw the ad 300 times.
“We think that this kind of disparity is concerning from a societal standpoint because high-paying job opportunities are being served more to male users than female users,” said Amit Datta.
Anupam Datta noted that there’s no real way to tell from an outside perspective whether Google’s Ad Network was using its own algorithms to send the ads to more men than women or if advertisers requested the push toward male users.
A Google spokeswoman declined to discuss The Barrett Group’s ads directly but said it’s possible that women saw a greater variety of display ads overall because advertisers generally target women as a demographic more. She also said companies have a great deal of control over the advertising process and Google policies outline which interest-based ads are permitted as a way to curb outright discrimination.
Another possibility was that algorithms designed to get customers to click on display ads unintentionally shut out more than half of potential consumers.
“Imagine Google starts serving these ads equally initially, then more male users start clicking on this ad. If that keeps happening since Google’s machine-learning algorithms are trying to optimize the click-through rate to serve the ad to people more likely to click on it, they’ll start serving more of those ads to males,” Anupam Datta explained.
Barrett Group president Waffles Pi Natusch said he’s not sure how the ads ended up skewing so heavily toward men but noted some of the company’s ad preferences might push Google’s algorithms in that direction.
The company generally seeks out individuals with executive-level experience who are older than 45 years and earn more than $100,000 per year.
Anupam Datta said tools such as AdFisher could be used in conjunction with private organizations like Google to curb the potential for discrimination.
Deborah M. Todd: dtodd@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1652. Twitter: @deborahtodd.
First Published: July 8, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
