Mansoury

The proliferation of personalized recommendation technologies has raised concerns about discrepancies in their recommendation performance across different genders, age groups, and racial or ethnic populations. This varying degree of performance could impact users' trust in the system and may pose legal and ethical issues in domains where fairness and equity are critical concerns, like job recommendation. In this paper, we investigate several potential factors that could be associated with discriminatory performance of a recommendation algorithm for women versus men. We specifically study several characteristics of user profiles and analyze their possible associations with disparate behavior of the system towards different genders. These characteristics include the anomaly in rating behavior, the entropy of users' profiles, and the users' profile size.