Search for ‘CEO’ in a Google image search and the very first female you’ll find is none other than ‘CEO Barbie’.
Sporting her trademark miniskirt the ‘CEO Barbie’ image sits 56th in Google search rankings and comes from a spoof article courtesy of The Onion from 2005 which ironically states 'women don't run companies'.
High ranking females within the business industry have retweeted the image which is being regarded as a gloomy reflection of the true state of gender bias in the workplace.
A recent gender bias study by the University of Washington discovered that image rankings can be responsible for shifting social and cultural perceptions concluding that “manipulated search results can have a small but significant effect on perceptions, shifting estimations on average 7%”
Earlier this year the most recent annual report from Lord Davies of Abersoch showed that four years on from his original report, commissioned by Business Secretary Vince Cable, female representation has almost doubled to 23.5 percent. Despite this, only 11% of returned ‘CEO’ google image results were females.
There is little more to hold culpable here than a set of complex web algorithms, however these results are a stark illustration of the state of women in the workplace, as represented in pictures.
