Women underrepresented in senior management roles via search engine image results

by Startacus Admin

New global data from search engine image results has revealed that women are being severely underrepresented in senior management roles when compared to the number of women who actually occupy those roles in real life.

The analysis, conducted by global business data provider Creditsafe, replicated a standard first impression for a search engine results page and looked at the top 25 Google Images* results for the search term ‘CEO’ in 15 countries to see how many times women were shown.

According to statistics from the International Labour Organisation, women represent an average of 31.3% of the world’s senior business leaders, however just 11.9% of Google Images results for the search ‘CEO’ were of women.

We previously featured UKBlackTech and their project to shoot a series of stock images featuring BAMEs using tech, due to the lack of available BME in Tech representative images, so this is another red flag for those who work towards better diversity in business.

Colombia was revealed to be the country with the largest discrepancy between Google’s results (0%) with the country’s actual percentage of women in managerial roles (53.1%). Russia, Norway, Mexico and Japan were the only other countries to have no female representation in their respective top 25 Google Images results.

On the other hand, Canada was the only country in this analysis to have a higher percentage of women in its Google Images than in real life (up by 2.68%). The United Arab Emirates (UAE) depicted the truest representation out of all countries referenced in the research, however, this was reliant on the region only having 10% of women in senior managerial positions.

Commenting on the results, Carys Hughes, CFO at Creditsafe, said:

“Google collects images from sites across the web and shows an aggregation to users. If we want to change this, we need to ensure women are being represented accurately in our media, as well as our boardrooms.

“Data accuracy is crucial to our performance as an international business intelligence supplier. It allows our customers to make informed decisions to help grow their organisations and we think it’s astounding that the statistics are so far from reality in most countries around the world. Our analysis has revealed that once again a source such as Google is not always the most accurate and whatever we are researching always needs to be backed up with accurate and up-to-date information”

The full results can be found here.

*Google is not used in Russia, therefore, the equivalent, Yandex, was used to collect the data using the same methods. In countries that did not speak English, an equivalent translation was used without gendered language. 

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Published on: 27th September 2019