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Recent research

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By Bri

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Online Images Amplify Gender Bias

Reviewed by Bri

"Online Images Amplify Gender Bias" by Douglas Guilbeault et al. in Nature

examines "gender associations of 3,495 social categories (such as 'nurse' or 'banker') in more than one million images from Google, Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and in billions of words from these platforms"

— Neuroscience News

Reviewed at Neuroscience News: https://neurosciencenews.com/gender-bias-images-25615/ and by AFP: [1]

An implicit association test (IAT) methodology was used, which supposedly reveals unconscious bias in a timed sorting task, in the researchers' words "the participant will be fast at sorting in a manner that is consistent with one's latent associations, which is expected to lead to greater cognitive fluency [lower measured sorting times] in one's intuitive reactions." The test measured times when images were presented in sets, whose individuals could be separated both into male/female and into science/liberal arts (based on their Wikipedia biographies). Those images were labeled by other humans recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Both the test subject, and the labelers, were adults from the United States, and the test subjects were screened to be representative of the U.S. population to include a nearly 50/50 male/female split (none self identified as other than those two categories). The images themselves – drawn from either Google Search or from Wikipedia – represented a preselected category list; the 22 occupations included immunologist, harpist, hygienist, and intelligence analyst, as examples, all found in WordNet.

Some test subjects were given a task related to occupation-related text prior to the IAT, and some were given a task related to images. The task was either to use Google search to retrieve images of representative individuals in the occupation, or Google search to retrieve a textual description of the occupation. A control group performed an unrelated Google search. Before the IAT was performed, the test subjects were required to indicate on a sliding scale, for each of the occupations, "which gender do you most expect to belong to this category?" The test was performed again a few days later with the same test subjects.

On the second test, subjects exposed to images in the first test had a stronger IAT score for bias than those exposed to text.

The conclusion drawn by the researchers based on the different IAT scores was that of the paper title, "images amplify gender bias", both explicitly as determined by the subject's assignments of occupation to gender on a sliding scale, and implicitly as determined by reaction times measured in the IAT. The researchers also determined – using the Mechanical Turk labeling – that images shown by Google search results exhibit a strong gender bias.

I'll get back to this - Bri

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I don't have the fortitude to understand the statistical complexities of this subject -- but it seems to me that availability of pictures and text accounts for a lot of what is called "gender bias." In reliable sources, especially in sources about historical subjects and long-dead people, there is a lot more information about men than women. And there are more photos and pictures of men than women available to Wikipedia editors. One reason is that many photos and pictures must be 95 or more years old to be in the public domain, and hence eligible to be posted to Wikimedia.

I have tough skin, so heave bricks at me if you wish for the above statement. Smallchief (talk) 17:52, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

Nah, I'd heave my agreement- you're right that bias in availability is the root cause of bias in the images used. IDK man I hope AI helps with that, but that's just me. Firestar464 (talk) 02:14, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

Male bias in images for "football player", "philosopher", and "mechanic"? They are not serious, are they? I say sloppy scholarship. - Altenmann >talk 21:08, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

I found a great reason to add a relevant and high-quality photo of a woman to Mechanic :) ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:57, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the authors do repeatedly call these numbers "gender bias" (although their chart legend for figure 1 uses the less loaded term "gender association"). This kind of fuzzy usage of the term "bias" is unfortunately common in publications about Wikipedia's gender gap, many of which interpret any deviation from 50% as evidence of bias on Wikipedia's part (in a "tipping the scales" kind of causal sense). Here, the authors do seem to be aware that this kind of reasoning can't be fully valid for all categories - besides the "aunt" and "uncle" examples quoted in the review, in A.1.10 they mention the category with the strongest negative [i.e. female] association (-0.42, “chairwoman”) [...] and the category with the strongest positive [i.e. male] association (0.33, “guy”).

Also, to be fair, the authors' main result focuses on the difference between these "bias" numbers for images and text. And, in the paper they also compare them with US census data on gender ratio of occupations and with the results from an opinion survey they ran, asking the question "Which gender do you most expect to belong to this category?". (We didn't get to cover that in this already quite detailed review, also because these comparisons focus on the Google-related results instead of Wikipedia.)

Ultimately though, the problem of selecting a "fair" reference point to compare Wikipedia to remains a difficult one. Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:05, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

They can't be serious. - Master of Hedgehogs ^{(converse) (hate that hedgehog!)} 00:10, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Amusingly, today, we have six bust pictures of men on our frontpage, typically the maximum possible. This is an issue that people have thought about before of course. Scientist has the pair of Curies as the lead image and that works great (also the first "scientist"? Wow!). But should we replace a picture of Bohr or Fermi with Meitner? These are hard and arbitrary decisions. The balance of relevance within the context/framing of the article can make it hard to improve on this, but I can already spot some places where we can include more women. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:51, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

I struggle with this topic a little bit because, as an encyclopaedia, it's our task to reflect the world around us, not necessarily to try and change it. Away from Wikipedia I'm a massive advocate for tackling the inequalities and stereotypes we see all around us, but here our aim is to present a neutral point of view. From a neutral point of view, the vast majority of nurses worldwide are female, so it follows that a neutrally selected illustration of a "typical" nurse would be female. We should present reality as it is, not how we would like it to be. WaggersTALK 12:00, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Typically, the bias of Wikipedia simply mirrors the bias of our sources, and that's in theory how it should be. WP:rightgreatwrongs is another hing we have to keep in mind. But I think even just considering looking for new images can be valuable for finding new perspectives to view a topic from (like I did on Mechanic), which might have a whole swath of literature tied to it as well. I think this works way better when it comes to using non-American/European perspectives, like finding images of Asian or African people in these occupations. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 12:12, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

Actually, rather than plugging in arbitrary photos of women into articles aboiut "male-domitated" occupations, it is good to add whenever possible sections about gender bias in them, especially when thisgs were changing. For example, "Rosie the Riveter" tackles the issue; unfortunately it talks only about simple skilled crafts, such as welding, riveting, etc. - Altenmann >talk 20:24, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

The fact that some people devote their entire careers, lives even, to topics like this really speaks to the state of academia. skarz (talk) 17:11, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Sure thing, "British scientists" :-) - Altenmann >talk 17:41, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

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