I was sitting next to my wife who was goggling for images of haircuts. (I have to admit,   I’ve never performed this type of search before tonight….)   She showed me a few of her search results, and I noticed that she had some super cool search filtering options across the top of her Google image search results that I had never seen before. (I had thought I knew all the tricks of how to use Google image search…..I was wrong.)

As it turns out, I just hadn’t been using the right search terms, like “for women”. Here is an image of what I’m talking about.

That’s right, when you search for “short wavy haircuts for women” you can filter by “over 40”, “over 50”, or face shape!   But why can’t I filter images of men by age or face shape when searching for   “short wavy haircuts for men”?

For that matter, how come I don’t see any men when searching for “short wavy haircuts”…

…..oh wait, there they are, seven or eight guys starting down at page six….

Based upon my 20 own year absence of   searching for (male) haircut images I can understand that there may be more photos of women’s haircuts on the internet, so the above seven pages of search results are probably completely algorithmically generated, and are simply an accurate representation of the interest and frequency of mens vs womens haircuts within the general Internet using population. (I’ll leave a Freudian analysis of this societal   imbalance to others….)

However, the dynamically available filters that allow one to search by age or face size really should be applicable to images of both men and women. Even if Google wants to explain their absence on the mens’ haircut results page with a “frequency analysis of usage” algorithm, it’s a cop out, because the Google Images Team should know better. When Microsoft’s machine learning chatbot started to reflect the racist and misogynistic tendencies of the internet at large, they shut it down.