Advantage men in Google search results for ‘best tennis players’

THE Lawn Tennis Association has challenged Google to end its “bias” towards male players as it takes search engines to task on International Women’s Day.

Online searches are making women’s sport almost invisible, research by British tennis’s governing body suggests.

Despite tennis being one of the most gender-balanced sports in the world, with equal prize money existing at all four major events, algorithms could be holding back its reputation for equality.

The Gender Equality in Search Report, commissioned by the LTA, found that “male-specific” content and information dominated results given for generic search terms about players, in a study of more than 8,000 keywords returned by more than 150,000 URLS.

In one Google image search for “best tennis players in the world”, 98 per cent of the top 51 results were male, with Serena Williams the sole female player included.

Looking at image search results for generic queries, 78 per cent of images displayed “above the fold” (which can be seen without the need to scroll down) depicted male players, compared with just 15 per cent female players. The rest were mixed results.

Where video results were shown on the first page of a search for generic “best” or “top” player queries, 86 per cent of the 269 slots showed male tennis players in the preview frame and as part of the “key moments” sections within the video, while just 14 per cent were of women.

The research also found that in the “people also ask” sections of search results, 92 per cent of the options directed users to more male content.

Research has shown this is not an issue exclusive to tennis or just sport, as a Pew Research Centre study in 2018 found women to be largely underrepresented across search image results for a number of different professions. To mark International Women’s Day, the LTA called on organisations including Google to boost the visibility of women’s sport by removing inherent gender bias in search engine algorithms.

“Greater visibility is crucial for women’s tennis and for women’s sport in general [in] building the perception of sport as being something for women, and in turn leading to greater participation,” said Julie Porter, the LTA chief operating officer. “We’ve seen recently that the women’s finals at Grand Slams have attracted more television viewers than the men’s finals, but that visibility is not yet reflected in the balance of what people see when they search.”

Anne Keothavong, Great Britain’s Billie Jean Cup captain, added that she worried participation could be affected by bias: “I knew it would be skewed towards men, but I didn’t realise by how much. I don’t know if I should be surprised, I feel like we’ve come such a long way but we are still so far off.”

A Google spokesman said the company was committed to improving its searches, adding that results “sometimes mirror biases or stereotypes that exist on the web and in the real world”.