#gender-bias

#gender-bias

When a woman directs boldly, it's trashy. When a man does, it's visionary

The media often portrays competitive, ambitious women as villains, and this pattern appears again and again in popular movies and TV shows. Consider one of the most iconic depictions of a powerful woman in The Devil Wears Prada: its formidable editor, Miranda Priestly, who is feared and disliked by most in the film simply for being authoritative and unapologetically ambitious. The stereotype is embedded in the title itself, where a successful woman is framed as cold and devilish for being open about her ambitions.

A source told the Times that the idea had come from deputy director Dan Bongino, a cop-turned-right-wing-podcast-yapper, whose justification for the decision was as follows: "Bongino said, You can have the best female agent take down the biggest case in our history, but if on the Ring door-camera video she's out of shape or overweight, that's going to be the story. He was worried about whether or not they'd look good on a doorbell camera. He said it's the way these times are."

For understandable reasons, much of the alarm being raised about AI technology focuses on a fairly narrow band of adverse effects. AI can hallucinate incorrect answers, which could lead to errors both trivial and damaging. There's also the phenomenon of AI chatbots encouraging their users to engage in harmful or even fatal behavior. But there's another side to this as well: are AI agents reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes?

As I walked to meet K-9 Ultra, a five-year-old explosive-detection canine and one of the finalists of the 15th Annual American Humane Hero Dog Awards, I ran through my list of questions in my head: How do you stay so focused during a mission, even in the presence of clear environmental distractions like squirrels and birds? Do you always comply with your handler's commands? And Is that behavior transferable to my civilian dogs?

An independent investigation found that San Leandro Councilmembers Victor Aguilar Jr. and Fred Simon retaliated against Councilmember Xouhoa Bowen and engaged in gender-biased and abusive conduct following her vote to censure them in November 2024. This finding should concern every San Leandro resident. Disagreements are inevitable in public service, but retaliation, harassment and gender-based abuse are wholly unacceptable - especially from elected officials entrusted with serving the public.

The faux fix touted by Fix Our Forests is a dangerous step backward for California's wildfire resilience. While it claims to protect communities, its emphasis on largescale mechanical thinning ignores scientific evidence showing that such practices can dry out forests, increase wind exposure and heighten fire risk. Proper wildfire prevention means investing in proven strategies: prescribed burns, defensible space around homes and restoring natural ecosystems that retain moisture.

The his­to­ry of sci­ence, like most every his­to­ry we learn, comes to us as a pro­ces­sion of great, almost exclu­sive­ly white, men, unbro­ken but for the occa­sion­al token woman-well-deserv­ing of her hon­ors but seem­ing­ly anom­alous nonethe­less. "If you believe the his­to­ry books," notes the Time­line series The Matil­da Effect, "sci­ence is a guy thing. Dis­cov­er­ies are made by men, which spur fur­ther inno­va­tion by men, fol­lowed by acclaim and prizes for men. But too often, there is an unsung woman genius who deserves just as much cred­it" and who has been over­shad­owed by male col­leagues who grabbed the glo­ry.

Ah, the trap of feminine likability. We're conditioned to believe there are only two options for how women are perceived, particularly in the workplace: we can either be liked or be respected. I'm always inclined to call bullshit on this kind of dichotomy. First of all, who says there are only two options? Who says what the options are, and who put those people in charge of determining the options we supposedly must choose between? Why do we have to choose at all?

Many behaviors come across as blatantly misogynistic. However, there are also subtly sexist behaviors, which most of society ignores or even deems "normal." These attitudes and beliefs continue to negatively impact women... That's why when I recently decided to ask the women of the BuzzFeed Community to share the "microsexist" behaviors they were tired of dealing with, I received dozens of responses. From eye contact to age gaps, here are 19 of their most thought-provoking examples:

To be clear, you can easily buy a skeleton dressed like a schoolgirl, or a mermaid skeleton (-‍maid, that means girl, right?), but those, as far as I can tell, are just normal skeletons that have been dressed in schoolgirl drag or had a tail attached to them. And a normal skeleton-the thing most of us picture when we picture a skeleton-is, I'm increasingly convinced, more often than not going to be a male skeleton.

Should women be themselves at the office? In the past two decades, self-expression has become a tacit expectation in many white-collar workplaces, with dress codes relaxing and companies professing interest in their employees' lives and values. You got hired to do your job, the thinking goes; no use sending someone else to the staff meeting. But the past few years of layoffs, hiring slowdowns, and dwindling worker protections have left a subset of wage earners inclined to keep their cards close.

Researchers have analysed hundreds of thousands of images from places like IMDb and Google Image Search as well as the kinds of online texts used to train large language models. They found a persistent age gap between men and women when it comes to how they are shown and talked about online.

This kind of age-related gender bias has been seen in other studies of specific industries, and anecdotally . . . but no one has previously been able to examine this at such scale,

The message, however, went to a work phone that she had deliberately left at home that evening; she had a date night with her husband, Markus Räikkönen, a former soccer player turned tech entrepreneur. The couple had dinner with friends, stopped by a cocktail bar near the Helsinki harbor, and then went dancing at Butchers, a night club named to evoke New York City's meatpacking district.

The study found that when using Google's AI tool Gemma, language such as disabled, unable and complex appeared significantly more often in descriptions of men than women.

Leadership effectiveness has traditionally been defined by military and state-building accomplishments, a perspective shaped by historical power structures and legacy of male historians.

The research shows that large language models consistently advise women to ask for lower salaries than men, despite identical qualifications. For instance, a difference in advice led to a gap of $120K a year between genders in some fields.

"Judge Woods' behavior is highly inappropriate and unethical, and he creates a toxic work environment, particularly for attorneys who are women of color."

Weiner stated that politicians like himself and Donald Trump can survive scandals primarily because male candidates face less scrutiny compared to their female counterparts, such as Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton.

Like the making of the movie itself, Rocketship X-M doesn't waste any time, thrusting its heroes into deep space just minutes after their pioneering mission to the Moon is announced.

Instead of saying I am sorry all the time, she could say 'Thank you for your patience.' This small shift boosts your confidence.

Six years after Caroline Criado Perez's bestselling book 'Invisible Women,' women continue to be underrepresented in clinical trials, with significant disparities in research focus.

The algorithms that dictate social media content have been shown to amplify misogynistic views, especially impacting the exposure of men to products like shilajit, which promotes toxic masculinity.