Google far less likely to promote executive role adverts to women

Women searching for work are much less likely to be associated with top-level roles by Google, compared to their male counterparts.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon made 17,370 fake profiles to visit jobseeker sites, these were shown 600,000 adverts which were captured.

One experiment found that an advert about a career coaching service for “$200k+” executive jobs came up 1,852 times for the male profiles but just 318 for females.

The paper admitted it was unable to fully understand the cause of these findings due to the complexity of algorithms and the inability to see advertisers' preference settings.