There’s a difference between thinking that male victims of domestic abuse don’t deserve sympathy or support, and thinking that it’s okay for “useful search results” to vary according to gender.
The results are biased because the danger is biased.
It’s an unfortunate reality that information about domestic violence is more likely to be useful to a woman concerned about an angry male partner than the opposite.
That doesn’t minimize the suffering of men who do need support, it’s just putting information more likely to be useful first.
The domestic abuse hotline is the second result, and the first one also affirms that everyone deserves to feel safe in their relationships, and to calm the hotline if you don’t.
“My wife/husband hit me” both yield the same results, which makes sense.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. One result affirms that you should feel safe and provides a hotline, the other starts with outright victim-blaming. The second result under “Maybe it’s your fault for not listening?” is not a hotline, at least for me.
My point is that if they just made the result the same then it would not detract from women, nor would it hurt the men who don’t need the advice. You’re going out of your way to defend an unnecessary bias by claiming it’s more relevant, but that’s not the point. They could choose to just not have the bias, and it would be a win while hurting no one.
My point is that it’s not an unnecessary bias, it’s different results for different queries.
Yes, I am going out of my way to say that treating an issue with a 1 in 3 incidence rate the same as one with a 1 in 10 incidence rate isn’t a necessary outcome to ensure an automated system has.
Providing relevant information is literally their reason for existence, so I’m not sure that I agree that it’s not the point. There isn’t some person auditing the results; the system sees the query and then sees what content people who make the query engage with.
I don’t see the system recognizing that a threshold of people with queries similar to one engage with domestic abuse resources and tripping a condition that gives them special highlighting, and a people with queries similar to another engaging with dysfunctional relationship resources more often is a difference that needs correction.
I’m not sure what to tell you about different results. I searched logged out, incognito, and in Firefox.
Those top bar things… are literally audited answers from Google. They’re outside the normal search results and moves the actual result completely in the UI. Someone at google literally hard coded that anything returning results relating to womens domestic violence should present that banner.
That’s not how it works. They code a confidence threshold that the relevant result will have to do with domestic violence in general. That’s why it provides the same banner when the result is more unambiguously relevant to domestic violence.
None of this is the same as a person auditing the results.
So you’re saying it’s the google algorithm trying to put stuff up that’s most often the final destination for those search terms.
That makes sense.
That aside, do you think that, if a human were to consciously decide what goes at the top for these searches, that the man should receive a little lecture on empathy while a woman should be presented with a hotline to get help?
Also, the connotation of “yelling” can differ by gender. I had male classmates in high school talk about parents “yelling” at them when there was no raised voice, just a discussion of how the child had failed to meet expectations. When men say a female partner is “yelling” they often mean “nagging” or “bothering.” Conversely, when women say a male partner is “yelling” they typically mean “using a raised voice in anger.”
When men say a female partner is “yelling” they often mean “nagging” or “bothering.”
I have a 60 minute recording of my ex-partner yelling at me. The yelling session didn’t last for only 60 minutes though. It was just 60 minutes after the point I realized I should be recording it.
And yes, I know how to accurately use the word “yell”. I know what yelling is. It’s what drill sargeants do when they’re an inch from a recruit’s face in the movies. That’s what I mean when I say “yelling”.
It’s also more likely that you’ll get to the store and back without an automobile accident, but you still wear the seatbelt for that 1/10,000 chance. Because the one time out of 10,000 that you get in an accident, you need the seatbelt no matter how rare a situation it is.
So, do you think we should put that information at the top of every search result?
Putting it on every search result is obviously extreme. There has to be a cutoff where you think that it’s probably not helpful to show someone the information so you don’t.
As long as there’s a difference in rate of different genders being the perpetrator of domestic violence, then you’re going to have a difference in when you hit that threshold for it becoming helpful, and you’ll get things like this where “man yelling” vs “woman yelling” land on different sides of that cutoff.
We can lower the threshold, and then you’ll get it for “man seems upset” vs “woman seems upset”.
There’s a difference between thinking that male victims of domestic abuse don’t deserve sympathy or support, and thinking that it’s okay for “useful search results” to vary according to gender.
The results are biased because the danger is biased.
It’s an unfortunate reality that information about domestic violence is more likely to be useful to a woman concerned about an angry male partner than the opposite.
That doesn’t minimize the suffering of men who do need support, it’s just putting information more likely to be useful first.
The domestic abuse hotline is the second result, and the first one also affirms that everyone deserves to feel safe in their relationships, and to calm the hotline if you don’t.
“My wife/husband hit me” both yield the same results, which makes sense.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. One result affirms that you should feel safe and provides a hotline, the other starts with outright victim-blaming. The second result under “Maybe it’s your fault for not listening?” is not a hotline, at least for me.
My point is that if they just made the result the same then it would not detract from women, nor would it hurt the men who don’t need the advice. You’re going out of your way to defend an unnecessary bias by claiming it’s more relevant, but that’s not the point. They could choose to just not have the bias, and it would be a win while hurting no one.
My point is that it’s not an unnecessary bias, it’s different results for different queries.
Yes, I am going out of my way to say that treating an issue with a 1 in 3 incidence rate the same as one with a 1 in 10 incidence rate isn’t a necessary outcome to ensure an automated system has.
Providing relevant information is literally their reason for existence, so I’m not sure that I agree that it’s not the point. There isn’t some person auditing the results; the system sees the query and then sees what content people who make the query engage with.
I don’t see the system recognizing that a threshold of people with queries similar to one engage with domestic abuse resources and tripping a condition that gives them special highlighting, and a people with queries similar to another engaging with dysfunctional relationship resources more often is a difference that needs correction.
I’m not sure what to tell you about different results. I searched logged out, incognito, and in Firefox.
Those top bar things… are literally audited answers from Google. They’re outside the normal search results and moves the actual result completely in the UI. Someone at google literally hard coded that anything returning results relating to womens domestic violence should present that banner.
That’s not how it works. They code a confidence threshold that the relevant result will have to do with domestic violence in general. That’s why it provides the same banner when the result is more unambiguously relevant to domestic violence.
None of this is the same as a person auditing the results.
Can we just agree whatever metric they choosed is biased?
So you’re saying it’s the google algorithm trying to put stuff up that’s most often the final destination for those search terms.
That makes sense.
That aside, do you think that, if a human were to consciously decide what goes at the top for these searches, that the man should receive a little lecture on empathy while a woman should be presented with a hotline to get help?
Also, the connotation of “yelling” can differ by gender. I had male classmates in high school talk about parents “yelling” at them when there was no raised voice, just a discussion of how the child had failed to meet expectations. When men say a female partner is “yelling” they often mean “nagging” or “bothering.” Conversely, when women say a male partner is “yelling” they typically mean “using a raised voice in anger.”
I have a 60 minute recording of my ex-partner yelling at me. The yelling session didn’t last for only 60 minutes though. It was just 60 minutes after the point I realized I should be recording it.
And yes, I know how to accurately use the word “yell”. I know what yelling is. It’s what drill sargeants do when they’re an inch from a recruit’s face in the movies. That’s what I mean when I say “yelling”.
It’s also more likely that you’ll get to the store and back without an automobile accident, but you still wear the seatbelt for that 1/10,000 chance. Because the one time out of 10,000 that you get in an accident, you need the seatbelt no matter how rare a situation it is.
So, do you think we should put that information at the top of every search result?
Putting it on every search result is obviously extreme. There has to be a cutoff where you think that it’s probably not helpful to show someone the information so you don’t.
As long as there’s a difference in rate of different genders being the perpetrator of domestic violence, then you’re going to have a difference in when you hit that threshold for it becoming helpful, and you’ll get things like this where “man yelling” vs “woman yelling” land on different sides of that cutoff.
We can lower the threshold, and then you’ll get it for “man seems upset” vs “woman seems upset”.