I've built gender identification models from first names, using census data. In playing with that data, it seems to me that African American names have a longer tail distribution. That is, the top 100 names cover a much smaller fraction of the African American population. I'd be interested to see actual data on that, but that is my semi-informed opinion.
Given that, those long tail names are going to be cheaper on Google ads. In my experience, the headwords are always more expensive. Thus, if this website is scooping up cheap traffic, that will tend to be biased toward "black sounding" names.
Google isn't doing anything other than selling keywords.
Comments
I've built gender identification models from first names, using census data. In playing with that data, it seems to me that African American names have a longer tail distribution. That is, the top 100 names cover a much smaller fraction of the African American population. I'd be interested to see actual data on that, but that is my semi-informed opinion.
Given that, those long tail names are going to be cheaper on Google ads. In my experience, the headwords are always more expensive. Thus, if this website is scooping up cheap traffic, that will tend to be biased toward "black sounding" names.
Google isn't doing anything other than selling keywords.