Lawrence KilliumYou might be a snowflake if: you’re so hypersensitive about sexuality that you can even see Google search results as sexist.
A technology company is doing its best to make the internet a more equal place by putting images featuring women into your Google image search results.
From Heat Street:
“Semcon, a Swedish multinational, launched a web browser plug-in to change what gets displayed by the allegedly prejudiced search engine.
The “Re-Search” extension launches parallel results fields so that searches like “engineer” show female people in hard hats as well as men:
The company claim their extension can “make image search gender balanced” – and will help end the social evil of stereotyping.
Promo material for the product said: “With the internet, many of us hoped we would get access to a more diverse set of images of different professions, and there is no question that the non-stereotypical images are out there.
“The problem is that they don’t show up in the search results, unless you search for them specifically.
“If we can present images of professions in a more balanced way to begin with, maybe we can take a first step towards better role models, images and balanced representation.””
Unfortunately, this extension… does not actually fix anything. All it does is open up a new tab if you’re searching for certain terms. For example, if you search “plumber”, it will open two tabs, one of male plumbers, and one of female plumbers. You’re not helping anything, all you’re doing is making Chrome take up more memory on my laptop, and slowing down the process for everyone involved.
“As the screenshot shows, all the extension does is spot when you search from a pre-defined list of terms, then kick up a new window that searches the same thing with the word “female” or “male” added to the end.
So, “banker” opens a window searching for “banker female”, and dancer a window for “male dancer”.
Disappointingly, the list remains very narrow.
Biased results pages for searches like “sex offender”, “internet troll” and “murderer” remain uncorrected – and true equality remains elusive.”
H/T: Heat Street
