The Age of Invisibility: How Algorithms Erase Older Women and Reshape Trust
What the Nature study on gendered representation reveals about trust friction, market efficiency, and the economics of bias.
SOURCE: Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models
When Bias Becomes Infrastructure
Some biases announce themselves with the brutality of slurs and the sting of slights. Others work differently; patient, systematic, encoded in pixels, and buried in training data. They don’t shout. They accumulate. They normalize through repetition until distortion becomes indistinguishable from reality.
The recent Nature study on age and gender distortion in online media and large language models exposes one of these quieter violences: a culture-wide algorithmic pattern that literally edits older women out of public reality. Across 1.4 million images and videos, women are portrayed as significantly younger than men in identical roles. The distortion intensifies precisely where it matters most: in high-status professions where women’s authority should be most visible. CEOs, doctors, professors: reality shows no age difference between men and women in these roles. The internet insi…
