We know the bias where men are “athletes” and women are “female athletes,” men are “writers” and women are “female writers.”

Conversely, women are “nannies” and men are “male nannies.” Women are “nurses” and men are “male nurses.”

Gender stereotypes and beliefs underlie sexist actions and institutions. We need to undo this.

AI bots are crawling the web and learning the same prejudices. Google results show the bias that is being picked up from the content it’s crawling.

What do we do?

On one hand we need to get the companies to address the racism and sexism in their results. The search results you see are already adjusted based on a ton of factors so Google and co. could build in correction for the non-inclusive results. 

But here’s an easy thing you can do right now!

When you tag your posts, “universalize” women and POC. For example, if you are tagging Serena Williams, don’t just tag gender or race-specific tags like “women’s tennis” “female athlete” “women athletes” - while you absolutely can use tags like these to help people find your posts, don’t stop there!

ALSO TAG: “athletes,” “tennis players,” “tennis”, “sports,” etc. 

THIS WILL TRAIN THE SEARCH ENGINES TO SHOW IMAGES OF WOMEN AND POC FOR THESE GENERAL SEARCHES, AND NOT JUST FOR GENDER/RACE SPECIFIC SEARCHES. 

This will also help in social media search results like on Tumblr.  

TAG TO CHANGE THE FUTURE