Examining the Presence of Gender Bias in Customer Reviews Using Word Embedding
This addresses the problem of algorithmic bias in business applications for consumers and firms, though it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new domain.
The study investigated gender bias in customer reviews using word embeddings, finding that algorithms learn and propagate gender stereotypes from millions of reviews, with implications for consumer choice and firm ethics.
Humans have entered the age of algorithms. Each minute, algorithms shape countless preferences from suggesting a product to a potential life partner. In the marketplace algorithms are trained to learn consumer preferences from customer reviews because user-generated reviews are considered the voice of customers and a valuable source of information to firms. Insights mined from reviews play an indispensable role in several business activities ranging from product recommendation, targeted advertising, promotions, segmentation etc. In this research, we question whether reviews might hold stereotypic gender bias that algorithms learn and propagate Utilizing data from millions of observations and a word embedding approach, GloVe, we show that algorithms designed to learn from human language output also learn gender bias. We also examine why such biases occur: whether the bias is caused because of a negative bias against females or a positive bias for males. We examine the impact of gender bias in reviews on choice and conclude with policy implications for female consumers, especially when they are unaware of the bias, and the ethical implications for firms.