Google Translate's Gender Bias: Female Historians and Male Nurses Do Not Exist

In a striking instance of AI-powered gender bias, Google Translate has been reported to erroneously translate female historians as male, and vice versa for nurses. The oversight is not limited to a single language pair but affects European users, causing discomfort and confusion. As responsible AI continues to evolve, such incidents highlight the need for robust governance and safe and secure AI practices.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.2 — similarity 0.437, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 3.1 — similarity 0.431, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.2 — similarity 0.428, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/59

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.