A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, out October 8 in the journal Nature found that women are systematically presented as younger than men online and by artificial intelligence—based on an analysis of 1.4 million online images and videos, plus nine large language models trained on billions of words.
Researchers looked at content from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr, and YouTube, plus major LLMs including GPT-2, and found women consistently appeared younger than men across 3,495 occupational and social categories. (Note: It’s possible that filters on videos and women’s makeup may be adding to this age-related gender bias in visual content.)
Study data showed not only are women systematically portrayed as younger than men across online platforms, but this distortion is strongest for content depicting occupations with higher status and earnings. It also found that googling images of occupations amplified age-related gender bias in participants’ beliefs and hiring preferences.
“This kind of age-related gender bias has been seen in other studies of specific industries and anecdotally . . . but no one has previously been able to examine this at such scale,” said Solène Delecourt, assistant professor at the Berkeley Haas School of Business, who coauthored the study with Douglas Guilbeault from Stanford’s business school and Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan from Oxford’s Autonomy Institute.
“Even though the internet is wrong, when it tells us this ‘fact’ about the world, we start believing it to be true,” Guilbeault said. “It brings us deeper into bias and error.”
Looking specifically at ChatGPT, researchers found when the AI chatbot generated and analyzed some 40,000 résumés, it assumed women were younger by 1.6 years and had less work experience, while rating older male applicants as more qualified—even though the data shows no systematic age differences between men and women in the workforce.
But perhaps the greatest takeaway from the study is that this biased view online reinforces inaccuracies about and stereotypes of women. When this distorted feedback loop between online perceptions and AI moves from the internet into the real world it can result in widening the gap between men and women in the job market.
