AI Recruitment Tools: What Lies Beneath

Turkish lacks gendered pronouns: The single word "o" does the work that in English is done by "he," "she," or "it." That linguistic quirk poses a challenge for machine-translation tools: to render a Turkish sentence into English, a tool like Google Translate must guess its subject's gender -- and in the process, often betrays its own built-in biases. For example, Google translates the Turkish sentence "o bir doktor" as "he is a doctor" and the grammatically identical "o bir hem?ire" as "she is a nurse." Google's algorithms similarly assume that a president or entrepreneur is male, but that a nanny, teacher or prostitute is female. Even character traits come with assumed genders: A hardworking person is judged to be male, while a lazy one is assumed to be female.