{"id":1508,"date":"2025-10-13T13:38:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T13:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/1508\/"},"modified":"2025-10-13T13:38:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T13:38:07","slug":"uc-berkeley-study-finds-google-images-and-chatgpt-misrepresent-women-as-younger-than-men-in-workforce-research-and-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/1508\/","title":{"rendered":"UC Berkeley study finds Google Images and ChatGPT misrepresent women as younger than men in workforce | Research And Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\">Despite no systemic age gap in the workforce, online databases and AI platforms depict women as younger than men across professions, according to a study conducted at UC Berkeley and published in Nature last week.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">This bias is clearer in jobs with higher statuses and salaries.Gender and age bias in training datasets for large language models, or LLMs, such as ChatGPT 4.5 could disadvantage older female candidates in AI-screened hiring processes, according to the study.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Assistant Professor Sol\u00e8ne Delecourt from UC Berkeley\u2019s Haas School of Business co-authored the paper with Douglas Guilbeault from Stanford\u2019s Graduate School of Business and Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan from the Oxford Internet Institute.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cI think initially I was more curious about why people say, \u2018Oh, I met this \u201cgirl\u201d at work,\u2019\u201d Delecourt said. \u201cShe\u2019s a grown woman \u2014 you know?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Delecourt said the research was motivated by a desire to utilize comprehensive data to challenge stereotypes and investigate anecdotes about gender and age-based workplace discrimination.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The researchers used several large scale open source datasets, including 2018 IMDb-Wiki, 2011 YouTube Faces and the group\u2019s own Google Images database. The study utilized \u201cthousands of people\u201d to manually tag images in the experiment, according to Guilbeault. They found that women were perceived as younger than men in images across professions.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The study found that exposure to Google Image searches increased participants\u2019 perception of women in the workforce as younger than men. It also revealed a strong word association between male-dominated professions and older ages across LLMs.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">However, U.S. census data from the past four years showed no overall age discrepancy between male and female employees across industries, according to Guilbeault.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201c(These biases) always have played out. We have not found a setting in which they didn\u2019t. That was really striking for us,\u201d Delecourt said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Guilbeault said the research showed that when asked to generate resumes for female and male candidates for identical positions, ChatGPT assumed female candidates were younger, had graduated more recently and had less work experience than male candidates. ChatGPT also scored resumes from older male candidates higher on average.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">These findings from language models, \u201cwhich are generated by and shared by millions and millions of people,\u201d show gendered ageism on a \u201cculture-wide\u201d scale, Guilbeault said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">He worried that biases in computer vision training datasets used for facial recognition software and for the AI programs used in hiring could create a \u201cself-fulfilling prophecy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cThey also come from a sort of move-fast-and-break-things mentality of Silicon Valley, where many of these products were launched well before they had been fully evaluated for their biases and their risks,\u201d Guilbeault said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Delecourt and Guilbeault said awareness is the first step to correct gender-age representational bias and advocated for dialogue between academics and industries on the social welfare implications of new products.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Delecourt said she hopes that other scholars will expand on their research by adding further considerations such as race, adding that \u201cbias is multidimensional.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cI think research like this is important because it forces people in the industry to have these conversations,\u201d Guilbeault said. \u201cThere\u2019s people within these industries who do care, who do want to help these problems.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite no systemic age gap in the workforce, online databases and AI platforms depict women as younger than&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1509,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[2274,2269,2271,2279,2276,2268,143,145,144,2275,2280,2270,2273,2281,149,2272,2277,2278],"class_list":["post-1508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-bhargav-srinivasa-desikan","tag-chatgpt","tag-douglas-guilbeault","tag-google-images","tag-imbd","tag-nature","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-oxford-internet-institute","tag-silicon-valley","tag-solne-delecourt","tag-stanford-graduate-school-of-business","tag-u-s","tag-uc-berkeley","tag-uc-berkeley-haas-school-of-business","tag-wikipedia","tag-youtube"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}