Women in work are consistently portrayed as younger and less experienced than men online and by artificial intelligence, a sweeping new study has found.
Researchers studied 1.4 million online images and videos, as well as nine large language models trained on billions of words.
They discovered that women are systematically presented as younger than men in thousands of job roles and social positions.
“This kind of age-related gender bias has been seen in other studies of specific industries, and anecdotally, such as in reports of women who are referred to as girls,” said University of California, Berkeley’s Solene Delecourt, who co-authored the study.
“But no one has previously been able to examine this at such scale.”
The difference was most stark when women were represented in high-powered positions like chief executives, astronauts or doctors, despite there being no significant age imbalance in reality, according to US census data.
“Online images show the opposite of reality. And even though the internet is wrong, when it tells us this ‘fact’ about the world, we start believing it to be true,” said Douglas Guilbeault from Stanford, who co-authored the study.
“It brings us deeper into bias and error.”
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The researchers also used ChatGPT to generate around 40,000 CVs and found the AI assumed women were younger and less experienced while rating older male applicants as more qualified.
In another experiment, they found that participants who viewed women in occupation-related images estimated the average age for that job to be significantly lower, while those who saw a man performing the same job assumed the average age was significantly higher.
For jobs seen as female-dominated, participants recommended younger ideal hiring ages, while for male-dominated occupations, they recommended older hiring ages.
“Our study shows that age-related gender bias is a culture-wide, statistical distortion of reality, pervading online media through images, search engines, videos, text, and generative AI,” said Ms Delecourt.
OpenAI told Sky News it has conducted extensive research into systemic bias in ChatGPT and found that less than 1% of the AI’s responses reflect harmful stereotypes.
