Face-recognition software is perfect – if you're a white man

Face-recognition software can guess your gender with amazing accuracy – if you are a white man. Joy Buolamwini at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested three commercially available face-recognition systems, created by Microsoft, IBM and the Chinese company Megvii. The systems correctly identified the gender of white men 99 per cent of the time. But the error rate rose for people with darker skin, reaching nearly 35 per cent for women. Face-recognition software is already being used in many different situations, including by police to identify suspects in a crowd and to automatically tag photos.