Does Google’s Ad Network Discriminate Against Women?
A paper published by the researchers at Carniege Mellon University and International Computer Science Institute studies the ads served up on third party websites using Google’s ad network. The strudy found that “when users identified themselves as males, the ad network was more likely to display an advertisement on the site for a career-coaching agency promising executive positions offering $200,000 salaries. Female users, on the other hand, were more likely to see ads for a “generic job posting service and an auto dealer.” This was discovered through Google’s ad settings tool that collects some demographic information and browsing habits to show ads appropriate to the demographic group.
As we discussed in class, placements of Google ads are done through a version of a second price auction that allows advertisers to have certain values for specific placement locations of their ad. Google’s ad network shows that advertisers can specify a multitude of parameters for consumers they want to market to, including the types of websites they visit, their age, general interests, and, of course, gender. This new study elucidates further complexity of the valuation and bidding mechanism (auction process for the ad placement) with respect to different parameters such as demographic information and browsing habits.
A key question in this debate is if the advertiser chose to target ads for the career-coaching service at men, or if it’s the fault of Google’s ad-serving software. Although it is perfectly legal for advertisers to do targeted advertisement based on interest and browsing history, it is illegal for them to discriminate based on gender and display different ads for different genders. In this study, the researchers were unable to discover if the advertiser was specifically targeting men and they were not able to get Google to reveal the details of their algorithm, thus they were unable to determine whether women were being deliberately excluded from seeing the career-coaching ad.
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/does-googles-ad-network-discriminate-against-123674289134.html