Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models

Are widespread stereotypes accurate1–3 or socially distorted4–6? This continuing debate is limited by the lack of large-scale multimodal data on stereotypical associations and the inability to compare these to ground truth indicators. Here we overcame these challenges in the analysis of age-related gender bias7–9, for which age provides an objective anchor for evaluating stereotype accuracy. Despite there being no systematic age differences between women and men in the workforce according to the US Census, we found that women are represented as younger than men across occupations and social roles in nearly 1.4 million images and videos from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr and YouTube, as well as in nine language models trained on billions of words from the internet. This age gap is the starkest for content depicting occupations with higher status and earnings. We demonstrate how mainstream algorithms amplify this bias. A nationally representative pre-registered experiment (n = 459) found that Googling images of occupations amplifies age-related gender bias in participants’ beliefs and hiring preferences. Furthermore, when generating and evaluating resumes, ChatGPT assumes that women are younger and less experienced, rating older male applicants as of higher quality. Our study shows how gender and age are jointly distorted throughout the internet and its mediating algorithms, thereby revealing critical challenges and opportunities in the fight against inequality. Stereotypes of age-related gender bias are socially distorted, as evidenced by the age gap in the representations of women and men across various media and algorithms, despite no systematic age differences in the workforce.