A Google Search Experiment: Googling ‘Washington state women’s equality’ produces webpages about women’s equality. Googling ‘Washington state men’s equality’ also produces webpages about women’s equality.

ActualDriver8 · 2021-04-07T17:38:19+00:00

Pretty sure that this is just the algorithm....

2021-04-07T16:43:49+00:00

Google's search algorithm sucks. It just shows the most clicked results, which just ends in a positive feedback loop.

OirishM · 2021-04-07T15:51:06+00:00

Ehhh, I'd be careful on leaning too heavily on this.

Firstly, I'm not sure whether they are doing quote-searches or just throwing those four terms into Google in that order.

Quote-searching all four terms just returns...basically this experiment.

Splitting up 'Washington State' and 'men's equality' into individual quotesearch operators does actually seem to give some relevant results.

It's not clear to me if there is just more content on 'equality' and 'washington state' that relates to women, and it's those three terms that are picking up the same set of results, irrespective of whether the fourth term is 'women's' or 'men's'. This sort of experiment is rather meaningless without some expectation of what might otherwise show up or should show up in a discussion of men's equality vs women's equality - and it might simply be that a lot of that content hasn't been written yet.

This reminds me a bit of those tumblr cringe posts from years ago where they'd try and claim Google was sexist against women because of autocomplete suggestions. Autocomplete suggestion (and search results) are contingent on so many things - location, cookies, browser history, language, google domain - and this experiment doesn't account for any of those.

Right point, wrong way of going about proving it's an issue, I'd say.

Long_Cut_7015 · 2021-04-07T14:10:28+00:00

I don't know if this is a bias from the google algorithm, or maybe because the content on men's rights and men's equality is almost nonexistent !

Gamer_Jack_Gameson · 2021-04-07T15:00:15+00:00

Ditto looking up material on domestic abuse. Searches for abuse come up with 5-10 articles on abuse from a non-gendered perspective, and 100 articles for women.

Searches for abuse with male victims gives roughly the same result.

mr554 · 2021-04-07T19:16:42+00:00

I think this is just the algorithm. After all, the most clicked searches will be traditionally women related pages, and the word women contains the word men, which will also mess with the algorithm and the way it produces results.

Singdancetypethings · 2021-04-07T23:10:12+00:00

Given that the phrase "Washington State Men's Equality" appears within the phrase "Washington State Women's Equality", and given what I know about search algorithms, it returned the most clicked results (pages about women's equality) that contained the phrase you searched for.

Blu3f1r3 · 2021-04-08T02:35:05+00:00

I believe the issue is not that pages are missing for "men's equality" but rather you're searching for the wrong term. Us men (at the statistical level) are already on the other side of the gender equality line.

The article eludes to a better term though: "men's (or male) empowerment," which has a few relevant results: - Team Up Washington, which features a program leveraging sports coaches to teach their young male athletes healthy relationship skills. - The Male Empowerment Network at Kent State University. - The Male Involvement Program from the Tacoma Urban League.

Obviously that's still not much compared to "women's equality," but we're talking about different concepts, & you'll find more discussion when not restricted to the state level.

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