If you Google ‘Unprofessional hairstyles for work’ …images mostly display black women with natural hair

A lot of black women with natural hair are a little outraged that Googles images for “Unprofessional hairstyles for work” only displays natural black women. After the cut is an article from The Guardian

Recently, an MBA student named Rosalia discovered something alarming: Googling “unprofessional hairstyles for work” yielded image results mainly of black women with natural hair, while searching for the “professional” ones offered pictures of coiffed, white women.

Often the hair styles themselves were not vastly different — only the hair type and the wearer’s skin.

Rosalia’s tweet has since been retweeted thousands of times – more than 6,200 in the first 24 hours, she says – as her discovery sparked discussion on implicit racial biases against black people in the workplace. Can an algorithm itself be racist? Or is it only reflecting the wider social landscape?