Name 3 celebrities.
How many of those names were women of colour? Be honest, it's OK if your answer is none. It’s not a reflection on you, rather a significant telltale of the kind of world we live in. The kinds of images and ideals we are exposed to, and what we can recall. This is something I wanted to address with Ensemble Magazine. Growing up I didn't see many role models who looked like me (me being Indian). My ‘solution’ for this was to create an inspired fashion mood board spotlighting celebrities who are women of colour - a simple task, right?
... And here came the next obstacle. Search engines and their algorithms are primarily set to favour ‘white results’.
Creating something fun as a mood board, the starting point of the research was Pinterest. This platform has always been a wonderful resource to get inspired and creative. Yet, when carrying out a simple search such as “woman of colour celebrities” the results confused me, to say the least.
What I searched for:
What the results were:
After refreshing (just because I didn't believe it)
After this I just got curious. What about Google? Surely not?? Surely Google is more accurate in understanding search terms and providing better results. This is what I found:
Ok, a bit better? At least we saw some iconic examples of celebrities and women of colour.
But, I could not ignore the fact that half of the top results (right side of the screenshot) were still white women. I could not ignore the fact that even with something as simple as a Google search result, women of colour have to share their space.
This says nothing about the white faces that we see but is extremely revealing of the subjectivity of algorithms. We often assume that data, algorithms, and computer science are all logical, unbiased and objective. Instead, we forget that these algorithms are created to favour clicks. That’s it.
Rather than providing results that are true to what I searched, algorithms favoured what was popular. Yes, whilst Jennifer Anniston will always be an iconic fashion idol and a favourite celebrity to many. She is not the face for women of colour.
So, to the creators of Pinterest and engineers at Google, answer me this: Why? Why is the result for ‘woman of colour’ not women of colour?
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