Goldman Sachs faces claims of sexist algorithms following Apple Card credit limits

The bank has come under fire for offering higher credit limits to men with the new Apple Card 
Apple announced plans for its Apple Card service in March, 2019.
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Amelia Heathman11 November 2019

When Apple announced its new Apple Card back in March, fans of the tech company were eager to sign up to the credit card that promised lower interest rates, no annual fees and no penalties for late payment.

However, its launch hasn’t gone as smoothly as anticipated, from issues with the white titanium design of the card to problems with the issuing bank.

This weekend, Goldman Sachs which runs the operational management of the Apple Card has been accused of using sexist algorithms to determine how it sets credit limits for individual customers.

Tech entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson, who founded project management software Basecamp, says he was offered a credit limit 20 times higher than his wife’s, despite the fact she has a high credit score. He described the algorithms as being “sexist” and said it was infuriating to deal with customer services after the couple were unable to appeal the decision.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak replied to Hansson to say he had a similar experience with his wife, where he was offered a credit limit that was 10 times higher.

A Goldman Sachs spokesperson Andrew Williams told Bloomberg: “Our credit decisions are based on a customer’s creditworthiness and not on factors like gender, race, age, sexual orientation or any other basis prohibited by law.”

The New York department for Financial Services is investigating whether state law was violated which ensures all customers are treated equally, regardless of sex.

Often when it comes to bias in algorithms, it can be down to the dataset that has been used to train it. For instance, there was an issue in Google Images whereby if you typed in CEO, you would often see images of white men in suits. It turns out that the algorithm had learned that navy blue pixels equated to a CEO, and white men are more likely to wear navy blue suits, which was why it was returning those specific images. Yet this demonstrates why datasets need to be analysed and scrutinised, so they don’t continue to perpetuate biases in society.

As well, it’s also an argument to encourage more women to go into the tech industry so these biases can be discovered at an early stage and removed before they cause problems. Google’s DeepMind has recently teamed up with Queen Mary University of London to fund a new scholarship programme which will support female graduate students studying AI.

Speaking about the programme, DeepMind’s co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said: “DeepMind is proud to be working with Queen Mary to help address the gender imbalance in our field. We believe that AI will be a transformative technology that will positively impact all sections of society, so it is essential that those developing it are representative of the population as a whole.”

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