Discrimination in Google

For years, Black women and women of color have faced discrimination from the internet and social media. They don’t receive the recognition and hardship they deserve, the interest gives terrible suggestions when someone searches for “Black Women” or another woman of color. In the book, “Algorithms of oppression” written by Safiya Noble, she dives deeper into how racist and sexist the internet browsers actually are. Many adults and children are shown these inappropriate and discriminatory links and advertisements on their everyday browser. The words “porn” nor “sex” were mentioned in the text box however these top results include them into the title. Specifically in her second chapter, she explains more in depth on what popped up on her screen when researching different ideas. She goes on to explain “…search engine results perpetuate particular narratives that reflect historically uneven distributions of power in society…. girls’ identities are commercialized, sexualized, or made curiosities within the gaze of the search engine. Women and girls do not fare well in Google Search—that is evident” (71). With search engines, they tend to be sexist by sexualizing girls and having inappropriate websites pop up on ones homepage. This affects young mindsets into thinking this is how girls and women should be viewed and how they always should be viewed. To add-on, When she searched up a specific race, African American, she founded many inappropriate and dirty websites not meant to be viewed by anyone of a young age. She was very upset and didn’t expect this to happen, so she went on to write this book about racism and sexism in the internet. Now, there is a lot of racism and sexism on search engines. Mainly towards women of different nationalities. When searching up different key words, many adjectives such as ‘sexy’, ‘voluptuous’, and other inappropriate words come up in the suggested. For years women have tried hard and long to bring themselves up as hard workers, not viewed on their looks or body but more on their strong wilded mind and how far it can go. Still, men and other point of views see women as just an object used for their sexual pleasure and its quite disgusting. Woman of color have been discriminated for many years and are mainly fueled by these search engines influencing more to have this toxic mindset because of the creators inputting terrible data into the system, it makes it harder for women of color to find jobs and be employed, and young minds are being impacted by the media and social media causing them to carry a negative mindset.

Great big search engines like google have the power to prioritize web search results on the different types of topics, from promoting business interests or advertising smaller companies trying to make them grow. With user clicks, combined with commercial mechanisms that make it possible to prioritize paid ads in search results, mean that women's representations are ranked on a search engine page in ways that illustrate the historical and contemporary absence of women in society, a clear mapping of old media practices into modern media architecture. “These human and machine errors are not without consequence, and there are several cases that demonstrate how racism and sexism are part of the architecture and language of technology, an issue that needs attention and remediation.” (9) Google’s algorithmic conceptualizations of a number of people and concepts are what each search represents. The prevailing narratives of Google embody the kinds of hegemonic structures and notions that women and people of color frequently resist. Instead of making a public immediately satisfied with stereotypes in three-hundredths of a second or less, we must challenge what advertisement companies serve as reliable knowledge. The prevailing narratives of Google reflect the kinds of hegemonic structures and notions that women and individuals of color frequently resist. Instead of making a public immediately satisfied with stereotypes in three-hundredths of a second or less, we have to challenge what advertisement companies provide as reliable knowledge. Google's algorithm works for you by looking for web pages that use the keywords you used to scan, then assigning a rank to each page depending on many variables, including how many times the keywords appear on the page. Google can connect to this index when a user enters a search query. To add on to how google takes charge on their algorithms, Google uses automated programs called spiders or crawlers, much as most search engines, to help produce search results. Google has a broad keyword index that helps to decide the outcome of your quest. This is interesting to analyze because with these index words google assumes one wrote, different and inappropriate pages come online when an innocent search is being googled.

With these websites, its harder for woman of color to be hired and employed in their work force because of the disgusting place they’ve been put online. Published text on the web can have a multitude of meanings, so one can concentrate on the implied and explicit messages about black women and girls in both the texts of results or hits and the paid advertising that follow them in my study of all these results. “While the campaign employed Google Search results to make a larger point about the status of public opinion toward women, it also served, perhaps unwittingly, to underscore the incredibly powerful nature of search engine results.” (15) We can see the ways in which search engine technology replicates and instantiates these notions by contrasting these with wider societal constructs regarding black women and girls in dominant U.S. popular culture. When black women are not working at Google in any large numbers, this is no surprise. Black People not only are underemployed as computer programmers in Google, Facebook, Snapchat and other prominent technology firms, but also jobs that could use the expertise of individuals who recognize the ramifications of racial and sexist stereotyping and misrepresentation and require undergraduate and advanced degrees in ethnic, Black/African American, women and gender. Through the conventional engineering curriculum of the large research universities from which technology companies recruit across the United States, one does not know the history of media stereotyping or the complexities of systemic inequality in any formal, academic way. Once they are hired however, the workplace becomes a toxic environment. Women of color sometimes feel invisible at work, and understandably so. Several studies also shown that black women's comments have been remembered less easily and less reliably than their white female and male counterparts. Managers should make us more mindful of this social prejudice and publicly advocate out occasions where good practice is undervalued or overlooked. They must also emphasize the achievements of these women through formal and informal means of contact. Faced with this stress, women of color frequently opt out of happy hour and other social activities and rarely reveal the intimate specifics of their lives as frankly as their white and male peers. Managers will help workers resolve this reluctance by offering a personal invitation to attend workplace meetings and making it known that they are looking forward to getting to know them better. Millions of Americans are struggling financially as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but Black and Latina women face work declines at higher percentages than their white counterparts. For certain women of color, unemployment has also happened more than once since the recession. Many are trying to find jobs in an extremely competitive economy.

Racism, in concrete and basic ways, hurts children. Not only does it harm their wellbeing, but their prospects for a happy, good life. African American teenagers start to use drugs on average later than European American teenagers and use them less often. This is valid despite the fact that in conditions that offer resources for use as well as a cause, Black teenagers are more likely to be raised. While several researchers have spoken about this, in different. “This best information, as listed by rank in the search results, was certainly not the best information for me or for the children I love…Of course, upon reflection, I realized that I had been using the web and search tools long before the encounters I experienced just out of view of my young family members.” (8) The author was expressing how she was traumatized that her young children were being exposed to these adult websites at such a young age. No parent what’s their children to be shown mature websites and unimportant information. With that, many different stereotypes have been put onto black woman on the internet like searching up “inappropriate hairstyles woman” and having only African American women pictures shown but when searching “appropriate hairstyles for woman” only white woman pictures are shown giving young adults the wrong impression. If the parents at home aren’t already teaching their kids about history and the right views, seeing everyone as equal, these kids will be inspired to look at everyone at a different level. Having everyone in a different tier system in their mind. Which will create a in diverse racial environment which isn’t right. There is a tremendous amount of research supporting the association between bigotry and physical wellbeing. And yet segregation can have a much larger effect than was originally understood. With Generation Z on the way to becoming adults, they use social platforms such as tik tok, instagram, twitter, etc to spread awareness of the discrimination around the world and what we can do to spread it. By posting on our Instagram stories and making a tik tok that millions of people could possible see, it shows that even though their is racism flowing through search engines and social media, there are many young girls and boys that are determined to spread the right message and to spread love and equality around.

Woman of color have been discriminated for many years and are mainly fueled by these search engines influencing more to have this toxic mindset because of the creators inputting terrible data into the system, it makes it harder for women of color to find jobs and be employed, and young minds are being impacted by the media and social media causing them to carry a negative mindset. Great big search engines like google have the power to prioritize web search results on the different types of topics, from promoting business interests or advertising smaller companies trying to make them grow. With these websites, its harder for woman of color to be hired and employed in their work force because of the disgusting place they’ve been put online. Racism, in concrete and basic ways, hurts children. Not only does it harm their wellbeing, but their prospects for a happy, good life.