I'm a bit mixed about this; it is clearly discriminatory to publish a job ad that says "women need not apply", but it doesn't feel inherently discriminatory to advertise a job in, say, "Men's Health" but not "Cosmopolitan" magazine. Or to advertise on a particular television channel or program (whose viewers may not match the population at large). That's just how advertising works. Is that crazy?
Would this be different if, for example, Facebook was targeting people for job ads based on "people who like action movies" or "people who like romance novels" (I'm stereotyping here, but just assume you pick a category that ends up being a decent proxy for gender)?
One thing you might be interested in reading about is Disparate Impact. Discrimination cases can be proven by showing that a practice has a disproportionately adverse impact on members of a protected class, even in the absence of intentional discrimination.
The Supreme Court noted in Griggs v. Duke Power Co that the Civil Rights Act bans "not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation." In fact, "absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures" that operate in a discriminatory manner. Unintentional discrimination is still discrimination.
In a piece on age-based discrimination, Facebook said, "age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work." (https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-ads-age-discrimi...).
I think a lot of the industry has been casual about job ads, but Facebook is kinda the first platform that really lets you be exact with a lot of your targeting. Before, maybe you feign ignorance that "Men's Health" doesn't have a lot of women readers. Plus, women can read Men's Health. However, I can't get Facebook ads targeted to a different gender. Facebook lets you be reasonably exacting.
If I create a Facebook ad for a job application with no other promotion of the opening (including on my company's website) and target it just to men, is that discriminatory? IANAL, but in Griggs the court held that procedures that act as built-in headwinds for protected groups are illegal. Making it so that women could only hear about the job from a man seems like quite a headwind working against their likelihood of getting the job. Griggs is about job qualifications that were used as a proxy to keep black workers from getting jobs, but making it so that a group of potential workers can't even see the job application seems similar.
Going back to your example: if someone used a gender proxy like "people who like action movies", I think it would be hard to defend in court. 1) They don't need to prove discriminatory intent, just disparate impact. 2) It seems likely that a company adopting such targeting would have communication indicating their discriminatory intent. "Facebook won't let us target by gender anymore! What can we do?" "Let's use things like action movies to get the same result!" If that comes out in discovery, it would seem like a simple case. 3) At some point, a court is going to want to know what the basis of that targeting was and it's going to sound really hollow. But it doesn't even matter if they come up with a good cover story, because even if it was unintentional, it can still fall afoul of the law.
On the other hand, if I run a tech company and wanted to target "people you are into the Python programming language", that's a group that will likely skew male, but it kinda passes a sniff-test. It just doesn't smell funny. "Yeah, um, we want programmers and I thought targeting people into Python was reasonable." That does sound reasonable. It's not meant as a proxy for gender, but for an interest/skill that is closely related to the job. Action movies aren't related to my job, but a programming language is.
Going back to the magazines: I think much of the same might apply, but I'm guessing that we've been relatively lax about it as a society. It might not feel inherently discriminatory, but disparate impact doesn't rely on intentional discrimination. You say, "that's just how advertising works," but you could easily place ads in multiple places to reach a wide variety of people. One program might not reflect the population at large, but I don't think it's rocket science to advertise in multiple places to reach a more representative sample.
As I noted above, Facebook says that job targeting (at least on age) is an accepted industry practice. There are people that don't like the disparate impact theory (though it is established Supreme Court precedent since 1971). Plus, I don't know if disparate impact has ever been used in terms of narrowing the field before applications even come in. In Griggs, the procedure disproprotionately weeded out black applicants. In the Facebook case, those potential applicants never even knew the job existed.
I have definitely thought the same things you've thought. Society is hard. Fairness is hard. But I think it's important that we work toward fairness. This isn't meant to be anti-company. I just think companies should have a bit of a justification for doing something if it runs contrary to fairness. If you're only advertising your programming jobs to people under 40, why? If the answer is, "we mostly don't want to hire older programmers, but if a good one happens to come along we'll take them", that doesn't feel like a great justification. In fact, it basically admits discrimination. If the answer is, "there are more young programmers than old programmers", I think the retort has to be, "given the loads of ways you can target, why not target based on interests rather than age or gender? Targeting to people interested in CS, various programming languages, etc. seems both better for you and for potential applicants...unless you're trying to discriminate." It's not always simple, straight-forward, or easy, but I think we're trying to build a better, more fair society and that requires hard-work and questioning.
Disparate Impact is one of the most illiberal policies in America. Companies need to be so careful that their results can't be construed as discriminatory that they need to go out of their way to make their hiring practices discriminatory. You could have a totally blind hiring process (remove names from resumes, modulate voices in phone interviews, never get any indication of race/sex/age of applicant) and still be liable for a lawsuit if you don't hit the arbitrary "80% rule" benchmark.
The Disparate Treatment and Disparate Impact doctrines are diametrically opposed, yet both can lead to lawsuits. When a company gets big enough, it's going to start running into discrimination lawsuits no matter what they do. There are things they can do to offset the damages (diversity training, diversity department, certain types of donations), but the end result can still be settlements in the tens of millions of dollars.
You see a similar thing with real estate in equal housing. I wasn't aware of how strict the standards were for this stuff until I took the license courses last year.
If you have a real estate office and somebody walks in, you might offer them a cup of coffee. If another person walks in later and you forget to offer it to them, and that person is part of a protected class...you've just violated equal housing.
This is why a lot of real estate offices will put out drinks, snacks and coffee with a "help yourself" sign now.
Well over half of the course was basically "how not to get sued."
While I agree, I was just shocked by the amount of legal stuff around realtors that basically keeps them from being able to be helpful. It has a huge effect on the perception of the profession because people are forbidden from really distinguishing themselves out of fear that a wrong word can get them sued (not just for equal housing but tons of other stuff).
Speaking of smells, my initial reaction is that Disparate Impact smells broken. I can see pretty clearly how it would be possible to argue legally that advertising a job internally and not externally (to a company) is discriminatory. And following that further along, in this way, I can see a pretty straightforward method of declaring any job advertising as discriminatory under that decision. I think law like this is broken because it's like many (American) laws where it ends up selectively enforced, because the base of people violating the law is effectively infinite. So in that way it's not used to fight discrimination, but instead becomes yet one more way to fight the oldest battle in history: The battle to consolidate and preserve the power of existing institutions of control and weaken the influence of competition and punish outsiders.
I think law like this is broken because it's like many (American) laws where it ends up selectively enforced
Laws like these are not criminal laws, and are not meant to be enforced if by that you mean policed. It's up to someone to file a lawsuit, if they think the law is on their side. Then a judge will have to rule whether or not the law applies in that particular case, and in doing so they may set a precedent which will influence how later cases will be judged.
And following that further along, in this way, I can see a pretty straightforward method of declaring any job advertising as discriminatory under that decision
You may think so, but this is why we have judges. Just because you can make and argument, it doesn't mean that argument will be persuasive to a judge. You may further think that this means that the outcome of a trial is arbitrary, and you would be right in the sense that law is not an exact science, and the result of a verdict can be difficult to predict if the evidence is weak and/or there is no precedent. But you would also be wrong in the sense that each verdict rendered helps to set precedent, and judges (and lawyers) always look to see what precedent has been set, both when it comes to how to interpret the law, but also when it comes to establishing what counts and doesn't count as evidence.
The fact that it's not actively enforced by the state doesn't matter.
It's basically the civil equivalent of an actively enforced law nobody can possibly comply with at all times that gives the cops the power to harass whoever they want whenever they want (e.g. the 55mph speed limit on I95 in the Boston area) except instead of empowering cops to harass people on flimsy pretext they're empowering plantiffs to harass companies on flimsy pretext.
Laws and precedents (in the case of civil litigation) that well meaning parties can't possibly comply with are bad.
> Laws like these are not criminal laws, and are not meant to be enforced if by that you mean policed. It's up to someone to file a lawsuit, if they think the law is on their side. Then a judge will have to rule whether or not the law applies in that particular case, and in doing so they may set a precedent which will influence how later cases will be judged.
This is one of the reasons that the "loser pays" approach to the cost of litigation used in much of the rest of world would not work well in the US. We use private civil lawsuits to enforce things that would be enforced by government agencies in much of the rest of the world, so it is important that individuals can bring lawsuits against much bigger, much better funded entities without having to worry about getting wiped out financially if they lose.
>Laws like these are not criminal laws, and are not meant to be enforced if by that you mean policed. It's up to someone to file a lawsuit, if they think the law is on their side.
That's worse, because then it shifts the burden of en^W^W policing onto those who actually want to go through the time and expense of a lawsuit, so only the most egregious abuses against the most powerful people will ever see judicial oversight, providing an extremely noisy signal that never provides reliable guidance, esp when (as parent notes) huge classes of activity are violating the ostensible "disparate impact" criteria but never prosecuted.
> But you would also be wrong in the sense that each verdict rendered helps to set precedent,
But those verdicts don't help when the set of cases going to trial is skewed as above. The only real signal it sends is "hey, don't do it in a way that might get noticed by someone who actually matters".
> I can see pretty clearly how it would be possible to argue legally that advertising a job internally and not externally (to a company) is discriminatory.
I think the precedent is the opposite. Companies and governments in the US do this all of the time without legal risk.
> And following that further along, in this way, I can see a pretty straightforward method of declaring any job advertising as discriminatory under that decision.
Perhaps a bit of a stretch here. Companies and governments will continue to advertise jobs
> So in that way it's not used to fight discrimination, but instead becomes yet one more way to fight the oldest battle in history: The battle to consolidate and preserve the power of existing institutions of control and weaken the influence of competition and punish outsiders.
This sounds like good old competition to me. Why would an established player not weaken competition with pricing or product value?
Regarding age based discrimination, discriminating against the "young" is allowed as they are not a protected class. Allowing the refinement and targeting of ads towards older people would be okay. But restricting the ads to only younger people would not be. At least by law in the U.S.
Yup. The young are the one class in america where discrimination is not just allowed but expanding. Businesses like car and hotel rental have discriminated against them for ages. But now big retail chains are beginning to discriminate as well as social pushes are made to violate the 18-21 year old rights to purchase firearms and the like.
It's pretty crazy. They are legal adults. They vote. They serve on juries. These are the people that fight america's wars and actually risk their lives but at home large companies are discriminating against them in an rapidly expanding sphere of things.
I'm only friends with people on Facebook who know my gender, so it doesn't really matter. Plus it only actually shows in a few places such as "xxx replied to his/her comment" notifications.
Any idea how Facebook handles people with rare gender pronouns? Doesn't Canadian law require use of chosen gender pronouns and Facebook operates in Canada.
I think I've seen "their" used instead of "her" or "his" where people declined to specify any gender. This works in English but not in German for instance, where I think they write "ihren/seinen" which translates to "her/his".
I suppose that's as far as Facebook's support for gender choices goes.
if I run a tech company and wanted to target "people you are into the Python programming language", that's a group that will likely skew male...
"Yeah, um, we want programmers and I thought targeting people into Python was reasonable." That does sound reasonable. It's not meant as a proxy for gender, but for an interest/skill that is closely related to the job
Ok, I'm not deeply informed on Disparate Impact, but as you just described it, as intent doesn't matter, if your "job listing targeting Python developers" skews male and doesn't pass the 80% test, you're still discriminating & liable right?
Job requirements are generally immune from discriminatory impact cases. That is, only someone who otherwise was a fit for the role but was discriminated against has standing to sue.
> If I create a Facebook ad for a job application with no other promotion of the opening (including on my company's website) and target it just to men, is that discriminatory?
You make a lot of interesting points and its a difficult problem, for sure, but I think this is a bit of a straw man. Even for company that explicitly intended to discriminate by hiring only men for a position could avoid the vast majority of what you wrote here by posting the position on their company jobs website and just only seriously considering applicants with male names. Trivial, even.
Its also possible that a company could be using gender targeting in advertising specifically to _mitigate_ the tendency for certain roles to have gender-skewed candidates, by targeting women on Facebook for python roles because their applicants through the passive/non-targeted listing sites skew male as an example.
I can't say one way or the other if that's what Uber did, but its impossible to look at the activity on one platform and somehow extrapolate that to the entire company's hiring strategy.
Facebook ad campaigns heavily favor advertisers slicing up demographics as much as possible. I am going to make the assumption that at the very beginning of the campaign an advertiser created many segments, split by age and gender. After they do that, certain segments are going to respond better and the distribution for those ads is going to increase while the others fall. The alternative is that the advertiser is going to have to jack up the bidding for the non-responsive demographics.
(And for anyone who doesn't know much about digital advertising, despite all of the crazy complexities, all of these systems are basically trying to maximize displays toward people who are going to respond to the ad and eliminate displays to people who won't. The definition of a response at the simplest is a click, but at the most complex is a lead, app install, purchase over a certain order size, etc. In many cases even the deepest pocketed brand advertisers will not be able to out-bid a highly optimized ad campaign for specific inventory.)
On the other side of the internet advertising pie you have Google (excluding Indeed and LinkedIn because I know only a little about their platforms.) An advertiser is going to bid on "driver jobs" or whatever, and Google is going to do the rest. Way back when, before Google collected user demographics, the ad is going to show just for the people who searched it. I'm going to take a guess that some job keywords split 50/50 while others skew heavily toward certain genders or age groups (e.g. 0 females over 65 are searching for manual labor jobs.) With Google's demographic data and machine learning based targeting, what is really going on today, in 2018, is a mystery to me. I would assume that these algorithms are not demographically neutral. They probably learn that males respond more to driving ads. Almost certainly on the display side of things (which Google's less sophisticated ad buyers might not realize they are purchasing) the ads are going to start skewing toward certain demographics.
Solely based on the way Facebook's platform works, I would question if it is ok for any advertiser to place ads on Facebook's platform as Facebook can place the blame on the advertiser even though it is ultimately a consequence of how their system is designed. On Google's side, the same discrimination is likely happening but the advertiser can probably blame Google.
At the end of the day, larger questions persist. How much money should employers be spending on letting employees know that they have a paying job available to them? And, is it ok that job opportunities, which may be superior, and being buried by those that have deeper pocketed employers?
Because of Google's semi-recent launch and expansion of Google Jobs results, which almost certainly will end up heavily monetized, I think these are very important questions.
While I see both sides of the argument, as long as the advertiser pays per view, it seems wrong to require the listing to target demographics that are almost certainly uninterested.
Your example of listing a job in Men's Health but not Cosmopolitan seems good. Technically not a perfect analogue as a woman always could buy Men's Health, but in practice very similar.
Spinning off into a different angle, what if an advertiser gets the most qualified female applicants advertising through LinkedIn, and the most qualified male applicants through Facebook? (Again assuming pay per view) Is it wrong for them to target women & men on separate platforms with separate ads? Utterly hypothetical of course.
Or yet a different angle, what if they have ad "A" and ad "B", each subtly designed to excite one of the sexes. Perhaps an ad for the Marines, one emphasizing toughness & grit, the other emphasizing teamwork & "stronger together". Target one at men, one at women. Legal?
To me it seems to come down to the overall behavior of the employer, not Facebook or any one ad.
I’m very skeptical that their motive is hiring discrimination as opposed to cutting costs on ads by targeting the demographic that is most likely to respond to the ad campaign. In other words, if the ad campaign isn’t successful for recruiting women, why would they spend twice as much for no increase in ROI? Maybe they could run a different campaign that targets women, and perhaps they are (if there is something in the article that claimed these employers are only running campaigns that target men, I missed it), or perhaps no one has found a campaign that is comparably cost-effective for hiring women as is the case in STEM fields. I just don’t see what these firms would stand to gain from hiring discrimination and I have a hard time believing they would take a significant financial hit just to be grinches.
Yes, I was thinking about that as I wrote, one imperfect but possible fix would be "no pay per view for job listings". Which, for all I know, could already be the case.
Nobody would even think to complain if the implication behind this post was that the company was self-sabotaging itself.
To briefly speak of ethical and legal issues, it is highly doubtful that they would have a policy of not hiring women if women actually apply for the position (and that would most certainly be illegal).
Much more likely is that whoever ran the Facebook campaign checked off that option in an dumb attempt at controlling ad campaign costs? Or maybe they ran a separate campaign to recruit women? Or maybe some other non-nefarious reason.
Fine tuning a message to an audience segment is something every marketer should do. When I first read the headline, this was the use case that seemed obvious.
Different audience segments may want different things from a job. For example, an increasing number of workplaces are offering paid paternity leave. Maybe that's something you want to specifically mention to men.
"While I see both sides of the argument, as long as the advertiser pays per view, it seems wrong to require the listing to target demographics that are almost certainly uninterested."
1) Is making a little economy really more important than giving equal opportunity ?
2) What makes you think you, or the person that designed the ad, knows best what might women (or any other group that might be discriminated against with similar practices) are interested in?
And that, especially when advertising for a job! Women may not be particularly "excited" by the message that conveys the ad, but they might be looking for a job all the same.
All your points sound the same to me, it comes down to : "women like cooking, teamwork and are not interested in being trucker, policemen or technologists, and men like sports and being stong and don't want to be a hairdresser or a nurse" now let's apply these hard facts to cut the costs when advertising for jobs. That way we make sure our stereotypes stay true, and it doesn't matter if it's unfair, it's just how are things.
And I don't think I can change your strongly stereotypical view of gender in this comment alone, but I'm telling you : that can change, and women want that to change, because they want equal pay, and equal pay also means equal opportunity to high paying jobs.
Employment opportunity is not the ideal topic to split hair, let's just not target ads at one gender.
If every person was the same on the average, then we would not have targeted advertising. Google/Facebook et al would not have invested millions (or billions?) of dollars in building a targeted ad network. The evidence is against you in terms of where people (both the seller and buyer) place their money.
Knowing what a type of person wants on the average is not discrimination.
No one is excluded though. A woman can buy Men's Health; a man can buy Cosmopolitan. What Facebook is doing is enabling straight up exclusion of genders from advertising, which is completely different in the eyes of the law.
That's not really how digital advertising targeting works though. In fact, they go to great lengths to make sure you illegally exclude by a class (Google is especially strict about this) and don't transmit anything that is considered PII or "potentially PII". Gender, like IP address, is in the potentially PII realm.
What this actually is going to do is target "people interested in typically male interests". That is going to end up including men, women and trans men. More importantly, the hit rate of gender-targeted ad spend trends towards 50% regardless of gender. It is not an effective tactic.
This is totally overblown.
/signed someone who used to be a digital advertiser in the legal space with a yearly budgeted spend north of $100 million.
I'm trying to explain that gender targeting is imprecise.
When I say the hit rate of ads targeting women is 50%, I mean that of the number of people who see ads that were targeted at women, only 50% of them were women. Targeting men works a little bit more consistently, by usually about 10%, but I don't know why.
That's industry-wide. I don't know if Facebook does better or not, but I have no reason to think so. Even if they did, it probably doesn't matter that much.
50% of viewers were women on ads targeted to women? How much better than chance is that when you take into account there are more men than women on facebook? It seems low given how well they can guess less tangible things like sexual orientation...
well, in this case it isn't perfectly fine because it shouldn't be described as "Gender. Target ads to women, men or people of all genders." if there is only 50/50 chance to display ad to woman. Isn't it just ridiculous and straight lie to potential advertisement buyer?
Ad buyers are very sophisticated spenders and know the score.
If they don't, they're going to get their money taken anyway and a lot more savagely than a mistargeted campaign hinged on gender.
I really have to drive this point home. Selecting gender as a target on Facebook isn't actually selecting gender and everybody involved knows it. It's a much simpler way to describe a much more complex set of decisions.
I was speaking more about the industry as a whole originally.
Facebook knows what you report as your gender but that's not a very good attribute to target off of. If I were doing e-commerce, for example, I would never use Facebook's implementation of that target (if they're going based off of what's reported to Facebook) because it would completely exclude gift purchases across genders. It would leave a ton of money on the table and be a very stupid thing to do.
My entire argument is that splitting hairs over this is irrelevant because any advertisers who rely on the accuracy of that attribute are stupid and pissing money away to begin with.
We are very specifically on a topic about what facebook does, and what I was originally replying to you about was that I think your general findings are not particularly relevant when looking at facebook. You said this story is totally overblown because gender targeting isn't normally very accurate, but here it absolutely will be because a large number of people will accurately set this value on their own profile.
> I would never use Facebook's implementation of that target (if they're going based off of what's reported to Facebook) because it would completely exclude gift purchases across genders. It would leave a ton of money on the table and be a very stupid thing to do.
But we're not talking about gifts, we're talking about jobs.
> because any advertisers who rely on the accuracy of that attribute are stupid
But why would it be inaccurate for adverts on facebook for logged in facebook users?
So let's think this thing through for a second. This will be best read in a Louis Rossmann-esque manner.
Hypothetical me: An HR staffer at a company with a headcount large enough to need an HR department. I get to post job listings and spend advertising dollars for those listings on Facebook.
Hypothetical my manager: Female. As ~75% of HR managers _globally_ are.
Oh yeah, hypothetical me again: Also female; depending on country and department rank, your HR staffer is 70-90% likely to be female. (It's the outlier, but in your country, new HR hires are 96% women)
The argument: Hypothetical me is going to buy ads, that my manager and probably my mostly-female coworkers can see, where I checked a box that says "only show this job listing to men". In an overwhelming social climate pushing for inclusivity and equal pay. In a work culture where these efforts are being _led_ by HR departments.
On what planet do think that this actually occurs? It is almost guaranteed that _at least_ one woman is involved in the decision making process or can audit it. Where are these companies with entirely sexist hiring processes that have significant advertising dollars to spend and where those dollars spent are going to make a significant impact in whether a man gets that job over a women in that industry and at that company?
Every industry is different. As far as legal advertising goes, in many states it's heavily regulated (especially Florida); traditional spend still outperforms digital as far as lead quantity.
Depending on the campaign/type of spend, digital advertising tends to convert leads in a range somewhere between 0.02% and 10%. 10% is extraordinarily good. Lead quality largely depends on the type of case, but ROI on the good cases is anywhere from low 5/6-digit auto injury cases which require little effort from a lawyer to hundred-million and even billion dollar judgements/settlements.
In the same vein, redlining wasn't targeting racial minorities per se, it was just targeting things that correlated with it highly. Under current civil rights legislation that is still highly illegal; gender-ish policy is still an explicit policy considering gendered things.
> "A recipient’s express or admitted use of a classification based on race, color, or national origin establishes intent without regard to the decision-makers’ animus or ultimate objective. Such classifications demonstrate a discriminatory purpose as a matter of law. See Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 904–05 (1995); see also Wittmer v. Peters, 904 F. Supp. 845, 849–50 (C.D. Ill. 1995), aff’d, 87 F.3d 916 (7th Cir. 1996). “Put another way, direct evidence of intent is ‘supplied by the policy itself.’” Hassan v. City of New York, 804 F.3d. 277, 295 (3d Cir. 2015) (quoting Massarsky v. Gen. Motors Corp., 706 F.2d 111, 128 (3d Cir.1983) (Sloviter, J., dissenting)).
Where a plaintiff demonstrates, or an agency determines, that a challenged policy overtly and expressly singles out a protected group for disparate treatment, “a plaintiff need not prove the malice or discriminatory animus of a defendant ….” Bangerter v. Orem City Corp., 46 F.3d 1491, 1501 (10th Cir. 1995); see also Ferrill v. Parker Grp., Inc., 168 F.3d 468, 473 n.7 (11th Cir. 1999) (“[I]ll will, enmity, or hostility are not prerequisites of intentional discrimination.”). Rather, the focus is on the “explicit terms of the discrimination,” Int’l Union, United Auto. Aerospace & Agric. Implement Workers of Am. v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 499 U.S. 187, 199 (1991); that is, how the recipient’s actions specifically deprived or otherwise adversely affected the individual or individuals of access to a federally funded program or benefit. Even benign motivations for racial classifications are presumptively invalid and trigger strict scrutiny in Equal Protection Clause and Title VI cases. Adarand, 515 U.S. at 223–24 (1995); Grutter, 539 U.S. at 326" [1]
>Just seemed odd to go out of your way to include the other three categories on those two axes and leave this one out.
Nothing in their post suggests they "went out of their way" to exclude a particular demographic. To people who do not deal with trans issues on a daily basis, it can be easy to overlook all the nuances of being trans. Calling someone out in a way that accuses deliberate motivations is borderline toxic, no matter what social issue you're voicing.
I wasn't calling anyone out, I don't deal with trans issues on anywhere close to a daily basis (or really ever, tbh) and I in no way mentioned or assumed the parent comment's motivation, let alone assuming it's negative.
Mentioning the "going out of your way" wasn't a call-out, it was a way of justifying the existence of my comment: if he hadn't mentioned trans people at all, I wouldn't have at all bothered with my comment. Since he was explicitly considering trans people in his comment, the addition seemed appropriate, and it came more from the stereotypical engineer-y impulse of "technically this is incorrect in a non-trivial way, IMO".
This is a bizarre position for me to be in: I get that the conversation around trans issues is extraordinarily toxic, and if anything I'm usually the one dismayed by its toxicity, but please don't impute motives to me that I in no way expressed. Frankly, the way you're looking at a simple statement and assuming all sorts of ulterior motives and implicit negative feelings is a precise mirror of the perhaps more commonly-known source of this toxicity, in which attempts at understanding from those less attuned to the issues (or as you put it, "dealing with it on a daily basis") are attacked as bigotry.
I don't intend this to be insulting, but given that your comment implies a certain level of self-awareness about intellectual honesty and charity[1], I suggest that you take a look at the assumptions about me that _you_ are bringing to this conversation. The solution to reductive, toxic discourse isn't reductive toxicity in the other direction.
[1] I haven't been active on HN for a while and have been on a board with much higher standards for intelligent, intellectually honest conversation, so I suppose I was uncalibrated and should've expected the knee-jerk down vote reaction I got, regardless of the political valence of my comment. Again, going off of your comment alone, I assume you're substantially above the median in this respect.
If someone - anyone buys Men's Health then they're probably interested in the topics they cover. If someone has a browsing profile and Likes that relate to those topics, they will get categorized very similarly. As a result, they are likely to see the ads accordingly.
Right now, Google thinks I'm a 65yo+ woman with high income. When I turn off my ad blocker (rarely!), I see ads related to retirement, AARP, etc.
If you were to only recruit from single gender schools then I personally would have an issue with it, same as this issue. However, if you are recruiting from many universities and some happen to be single gender, that is not discriminating.
I can kind of see what they're getting at. Women are under-represented in the tech industry. I don't think many people would disagree with that.
But this feels like a blunt instrument for a highly-nuanced issue. If diversity of experience is a core value at Duolingo, why not recruit everywhere and tailor the interviewing process to favor candidates from non-traditional backgrounds?
While they've achieved an important milestone, I'd be very worried about the line of thinking that led to this decision if I were a Duolingo investor. All the diversity in the world doesn't mean much if they can't find a way to keep the lights on.
> Duolingo has a policy of only recruiting from schools that have an above-average percent of women in their CS program.
Thats a misleading statement.
IMO, The main reason why they did that is because Carnegie Mellon University has more woman than men in its incoming CS classes, and Duolingo wanted an excuse to exclusively recruit from CMU (Which one of the founders teach at, and is strongly associated with).
So they are more interested in being politically correct than in recruiting the best talent available? My respect for them just went down. This is not a way to fight gender discrimination, but rather to perpetuate it.
It's more like: you're in a certain group, you get hired, and you know that the company that hired you has this policy of prioritizing hiring from your group. You spend your days in that company wondering whether you got are there because you're good at what you do, or merely because you are member of the prioritized group. I wouldn't want to be in such position.
Would you enjoy always wondering whether e.g. people in your team are listening to you because what you're saying is worth saying, or if they are merely humoring you and tolerate you in their team on account of orders from above?
Something like this must do ugly things to one's mind and one's perception of self-worth.
What's fair about perpetuating the systematic discrimination that women in tech face?
And in what way is this special treatment?
Companies use a variety of different metrics by which to determine which schools they should recruit from. "We want to increase our diversity" is a reasonable metric to use, and "recruit from colleges with an above-average percentage of people in a minority group we've chosen to view as important" is a reasonable way to accomplish that.
I shouldn't have to point this out, but diversity is more than just a buzzword. Increasing diversity on the development side improves the final product, for a variety of reasons.
What if the companies that were placing job ads on Facebook were also placing job ads on other platforms that weren't targeted to men only? Playing devils advocate here...
I think the previous question was about the institution. In this case, Facebook has people of all genders, not just one.
It only be an apt analogy to the Universities if Facebook were some single-gender social network. Or if an all-gender University let you only recruit one gender.
The devil probably has enough advocates at this point and doesn't need your contribution.
But in general, there are classes of ads that you just can't target based on certain classes, period. Even if you hypothetically might have the ability to target a counterbalancing ad somewhere else. Facebook repeatedly has been in hot water over this, and both they and the people using their ad platform to do this stuff need to get more than a slap on the wrist, in order to deter others from trying the same in the future.
Well if Facebook wasn't a large portion of the online advertising market then there might be an argument. When you try to become a monopoly you get extra responsibilities as you gain market share
Where in the world did you get that from? I never said anything of the sort.
I literally take issue with it, as in I don't think it is right. I said nothing about the implications and I certainly don't think someone should be jailed for poor recruiting practices.
Making something illegal means putting people in jail directly or if they refuse to cooperate. In many countries this is what happens to people with what you would consider poor recruiting practices. It's usually called something like discrimination against a protected class. Many people in power today consider your rejection of jailtime for poor recruiting practices a sexist position.
Advertising on one platform for one gender doesn't mean the job is only for one gender. And if job was open to one gender only, there're already laws against that...
Saying that "FB is not a single gender platform" is like saying that "Higher education is not a single gender platform".
Recruiting only from Barnard doesn't mean that job is only for one gender either.
You're missing their point about using limits on the market supply to discriminate for a job - i.e. even if that job is "open to all", but you've limited applicants to one gender.
HR and legal depts that don't want their company to be sued for violating Title VII will make sure that they aren't recruiting only from Barnard, unless they're some bona fide exception (e.g. hiring models for women's clothing). This idea that they need to recruit from men's only career fairs is your own.
I'm saying that one-gender-only job advertising is not a novelty that happened for the first time in Facebook.
As other commenter pointed out, how is this different from advertising in women/men magazine? Should we ban those as well? Sure, one can argue that their readers are only 98% one gender. But then some people on FB lie about their gender and some browse FB on somebody else's account. E.g. My GF never logs out off Facebook on shared devices and I see ads targeting women all the time.
All in all, we should look at bigger problem of targeted advertising rather exclusive loaded cases. I've no idea what targeted advertising line is "good enough". On the other hand, targeted advertising is definitely causing massive societal problems and political polarisation.
It's not entirely different in the eyes of law - in fact, advertising a job solely in men-targeted magazines would be considered as a discriminatory recruitment practice and be just as illegal as these targeted Facebook ads.
Man, what an unimaginable dystopia, where VS’s hand were forced to the point where they made ads that played on men’s desires and were visually appealing to them ... /s
If you mean, “what if they had to make ads that promoted men wearing their products”, I get your point, but I thought it was a funny ambiguity.
Basically, I think the better lens is one that looks at discriminatory hiring practices, rather than one that looks at advertisements to a selected demographic.
> Would this be different if, for example, Facebook was targeting people for job ads based on "people who like action movies" or "people who like romance novels" (I'm stereotyping here, but just assume you pick a category that ends up being a decent proxy for gender)?
No, this would still be illegal (in the US, anyway). The only difference is that Facebook wouldn't be aiding/abetting an illegal hiring practice. Employers can and have been penalized for hiring from homogenous applicant pools.
Exactly. This doesn't necessarily mean these companies advertised the job to one gender. It simply means the ad was targeted at a specific gender. For all we know, the companies spent twice as much on a different ad set for women.
Theoretically? For the same reason many companies have different advertisements that target different populations - because different advertisements play to different needs/desires, so you can engage with people in the most efficient way in terms of conversion.
Under the law it would different, none of your examples are protected classes, discrimination in employment is only illegal if the targeted/excluded group is a protected class, those being: men and women on the basis of sex; any group which shares a common race, religion, color, or national origin; people over 40; and people with physical or mental handicaps.
The company I work for, for example, does not hire smokers (and makes this clear during hiring and makes the specifics part of our contracts), and this is perfectly legal. But it would be illegal to not hire anyone based on being in, or not being in, one of those specific protected classes.
Now, if they were being used as proxies for those classes, then yes it would be illegal, but it would be up to a court to determine if that was the case. If I ran a company that made action movies "Must love action movies" being a basis for my hiring decisions is obviously not intended as a proxy for a protected class and would be legal. If my company makes printer paper, then I'm on shaky legal ground.
That being said, I'm not sure if there are actually laws making it illegal to publish discriminatory job ads for someone, but Facebook assisting in illegal and discriminatory actions is an issue regardless of if their part is specifically illegal or not.
Context matters. The question is one of harm... is it perpetuating or expanding an existing injustice or privilege, and to what extent? People who dislike action movies aren't the subject of any severe underrepresentation in a job market, so it's clearly not as big of a problem.
>I'm a bit mixed about this; it is clearly discriminatory to publish a job ad that says "women need not apply",
In general that is discrimination, but as with all things in law the general rule only exists for exceptions. One exception is a “Bonafide occupational qualification”...some famous cases involve men playboy, hooters, and Abercrombie and Fitch (though A&F was a case of discrimition against blacks, which A&F attempted to defend by arguing being white was a bonafide occupation qualification because it fit their overall marketing and target demographic).
Let's say that a man has a subscription to The New York Times, but the NYT chooses to print a Men's version that has some job postings and a Women's version that has other job postings without telling you. What if the man is a cosmetologist and isn't seeing any cosmetology job postings because they're all in the Women's edition? The issue with targeting by sex is that it presupposes interest in certain areas, and while a person's interests can change, a person's sex can't [without significant medical intervention].
Yes, it would be very different. For example, the two things you listed are probably rather bad proxies for gender (even if it's only hypothetical).
All they had to do was pick the niche they're going for (which may incidentally turn out to be highly skewed to one gender) rather than making it 100% one gender. I honestly don't even understand the purpose of advertising anything to only men or only women. (The obvious answer would be "sexism", but presumably the advertiser is making some assumption of economic benefit for only targeting one or the other.)
I honestly don't even understand the purpose of advertising anything to only men or only women.
If you pay per view, it's entirely rational to target towards the demographic that produces the most spend for your ad budget.
Why would you waste money advertising, e.g., mascara or sanitary pads to men? Sure, there's probably some infinitesimal fraction of men who would be interested, but targeting them profitably is not a trivial exercise.
Why would you waste money advertising to women who don't want mascara or don't need pads? I would think you'd be better of targetting people who bought some sort of eye makeup if you wanted to sell mascara, and target people who bought pads or tampons if you were selling pads.
I'm not an ad man, but you have imperfect data about your customers, and I gather it's all about trying to predict what they might buy based on very imperfect/incomplete information about them. Plus, your ability to apply more advanced heuristics is constrained by your ability to develop them, both from a technical & marketing standpoint.
"User is a woman" would, in this hypothetical example, be one factor in your larger weighting algorithm. A weighting factor that is, might I add, quite easy to implement compared to detecting male performing arts majors with a specialty in costume design.
> Why would you waste money advertising to women who don't want mascara or don't need pads?
Because you don't know in advance. It's entirely why advertisers offer so many different bits of information on you, to optimise this.
> I would think you'd be better of targetting people who bought some sort of eye makeup if you wanted to sell mascara, and target people who bought pads or tampons if you were selling pads.
And people do this, if they have this information. Of course, there's also the side that you don't want to advertise to someone you strongly expect to buy, because it's the conversions from no-sale to sale you care about.
In classic rubber duck-debugging style, I ended up realizing that as soon as I pressed submit.
In that case I suppose it's not very ethically questionable for things that are very clearly 100% (within a minuscule margin of error) men's only (prostate health, etc.) or women's only (sanitary pads).
I guess the real quandary is for stuff that's male-dominated like hard, dangerous physical labor (coal mining etc.), but not 100% men. If a recruiter can statistically prove that the most efficient use of their advertising dollars to hire for a coal mining job is by targeting only men, 1) is it sexist and/or unethical, and 2) should it be legal?
> a recruiter can statistically prove that the most efficient use of their advertising dollars to hire for a coal mining job is by targeting only men, 1) is it sexist and/or unethical, and 2) should it be legal?
I put this at the same level as only hiring women to teach elementary school. Yes, it is sexist and uneducated. No, it shouldn't be legal.
I think there's a difference between "hiring only men/women" and "advertising to only men/women". A company could launch a recruitment campaign which is only visible to one gender, but still not discriminate against applicants from the opposite gender. Presumably they have many more ways to list job openings than targeted Facebook ads, so they're not specifically excluding one gender from that job; just from the ad.
Isn’t it discriminatory to have an intent to discriminate based on gender? “We want more <gender> at our company.” Unless gender is a bonafide qualification, that should be illegal just as “we want to hire more white people.”
Right, but let's go with the premise that you have an imbalance, and are trying to bring into balance. Then a gender or race targeted ad seems like a reasonable approach.
I guess my point is an targeted ad isn't evidence of intent to discriminate, and in fact can be a key component of pro-diversity actions.
If it's sexist(Wikipedia definition, yeah... I looked it up) then it's unethical, and if it's unethical I'd assume that's because of the sexism.
Is it unethical and sexist? If it is, being overtly sexist/racist/classist and supporting it with data seems worse to me that just the former. Even it it is, it should surely not be outlawed.
I tried to avoid confusion by referring to the Wikipedia definition, which by my ethical framework pretty much always unethical, but should very rarely be outlawed. It would be a nightmare to validate.
Well, there are many gender specific products there, for example female hygiene products. Doesn't mean the opposite sex will straightly not buy them (Yes, they do, https://mashable.com/2018/01/28/amazon-go-tampons-pads-tech-...), but it is safe to assume that they are probably not interested (Look at the previous link and there is actually an outrage because of it.).
The usual scenario is that you make a bunch of variants of an ad, do some testing and find out that option A works a bit better on women, option C works a bit better on men, and option B sucks; so then you'd run ad A targeting only women, and ad C targeting only men. You don't want to show ad C to any women since you have reasons to believe that showing ad A would be more effective for the same price.
It is unlikely only and all men. They probably don't target men without college degrees. They way they probably get where they did was by successively narrowing down by selecting more attributes.
>>but it doesn't feel inherently discriminatory to advertise a job in, say, "Men's Health" but not "Cosmopolitan" magazine.
Similar but still very different argument. A woman can pick up Men's Health but FB ads just don't show up in her stream. Also Uber specifically and purposefully left women out, unless they say, "oh, we clicked the checkbox by mistake" ("or didn't click the women one..." )
What if they would advertise in a tech journal? Most readers are still probably male... But the journal is related to the job. Would that be discriminatory?
No, because the point is that "most readers" are male. The advertisement should be unisex. If a woman picks up that journal - whether just looking for want ads or because they are legitimately interested in the topic - they should be considered with complete equity to any male candidate. The point isn't where you advertise, it's if you target. You can target by geography. You can target by education. You can't target by sex.
What if the ads were targeted at "people with an interest in driving"? I'm fairly sure the percentage of men that fall under that category is higher than women. I mean there's a bunch of car magazines that are gender neutral (that is, they avoid juvenile jokes or cat suit models), if there's an Uber ad in there it'd still mostly be men that read it.
Anyone can buy Cosmopolitan and read ads, but no one can pretend for being someone other on fb/etc. If zuck and alphabet provided options to tune your profile card and live the other live for a while, an argument would be over and ads would not suffer. Default settings rule the world anyway. People could also escape few echo chambers as a side effect.
> That's just how advertising works. Is that crazy?
Why should advertising be considered the default or the correct method ? People still need jobs to feed themselves and their loved ones. It's about their survival and oppression and discrimination is still a thing.
Would there be a debate if ethnic was used instead of gender ?
This is not lifestyle advertising. Tenders, job ads and other categories that require equal access and transparency have rules to prevent exactly this kind of discrimination and skullduggery.
Facebook had made an error here, as has Uber and this is a pretty straightforward violation.
I don’t know about the US but there are rules in regards to job postings in the UK and likely the EU at large that would make that a violation of anti-discrimination laws.
I can't speak for the UK but in Belgium it's certainly illegal to discriminate based on gender, age, race, ....
There was even a case recently where a man won a lawsuit because he was excluded by a clothing store that was searching for a female employee for doing an inventory job.
"Brussels, 23 August 2018 - The legal action taken by the Institute for Equality of Women and Men reminds employers that sex is not a criterion for refusing an application. The Leuven Labor Court has sentenced a clothing store to discrimination based on sex. He refused a man's candidacy because he wanted to hire a woman."
That being said I also seen adverts asking for women but technically it's against the law and even with all those laws discriminations happen more often than not.
There are exceptions like modelling or acting where roles where there could be reasonable reasons for being gender-specific but not for the tech and public sector jobs described in the article.
Given the way issues like this overlap with the European Convention on Human Rights I would expect it to be very similar across Europe (certainly within the EU).
You're telling me, if I run a clinic or rehab facility where women with trauma are more comfortable with other female therapists, I'm somehow required to advertise to and interview both men and women for a job - even when I'm only short on demand for a female therapist from a specific demographic or with certain qualifications? The same would go for a shortage of male employees based on patient or clientele requests and demands.
I'm not saying Uber has a reason to do this. They may or may not, but to say this feature or ability is illegal is just idiotic. In fact, it's rather useful and worth paying for in my opinion.
> If I run a clinic or rehab facility where women with trauma are more comfortable with other female therapists, I'm somehow required to advertise to and interview both men and women for a job
No, you're not. This is a well-established area of the law, called a bona fide occupational qualification:
> One example of bona fide occupational qualifications are mandatory retirement ages for bus drivers and airline pilots, for safety reasons. Further, in advertising, a manufacturer of men's clothing may lawfully advertise for male models. Religious belief may also be considered a BFOQ; for example, a religious school may lawfully require that members of its faculty be members of that denomination, and may lawfully bar from employment anyone who is not a member. Fire departments can require firemen to be able to lift a given weight to demonstrate that they will be able to carry fire victims out of a burning building.
Men’s health and FB operates at very different scales. FB ads can influence at the global scale and their discriminatory nature can bring potentially much more harm.
I don't understand the problem. The flipside would be they're letting Job Advertisers only target women.
I wonder what those numbers look like: What percentage of job advertisers only target women?
If I'm spending ad dollars, why would I not choose the most effective form of advertising for me?
That's not to say they're not hiring women. In which case it'd be more dubious.
Last week in the Bay Area I heard a TSA radio advertisement, in which they said, 'women and people of color strongly encouraged to apply.' Imagine the outrage if they had said 'white men strongly encouraged to apply'?
All the qualification based on immutable characteristics, versus actual ability to do the job, makes me feel very uneasy.
It's interesting to think about. If I'm looking for someone to ride on a garbage truck, there's probably a 95% chance the future employee will be male, but acting on this expectation, by advertising to men instead of women - getting more employees per dollar spent, is sexist. Likewise, if I needed to hire an au pair I'd have to advertise to men and women equally?
I don't think it's sexist to target men for a job posting.
You know the job, you know what it entails and you know what works behaviorally and physically. There are differences between genders. That's okay.
I do think it's sexist to not hire a qualified women for the job because she's a women ( esp. in the garbage collector scenario). Like you hate women or something and you don't hire them ( funny story I heard a women on the sidewalk casually say she hated men. Never heard a man say that... ) The same for the flipside.
I do think it's a sexist double standard to say it's not okay to target men for a job and not mention anything about the flipside: it's okay to only target women.
The law says that it is "sexist" (i.e. discrimination) to target advertising in a way that denies qualified women the opportunity to apply for a particular job.
In the end the net result of targeting only men is the same as refusing to hire women, it denies otherwise qualified women opportunities that they are deserving of.
That this has a cost is understood by those who wrote the law, they decided those costs are worth it.
No women ever saw the ad, so how could they apply? The courts have ruled it's the same as denying qualified people the job. The opportunity was unfairly hidden from them.
Imagine the job posting was in the men's toilet. The company would have a hard time arguing women had fair notice.
For sure. But you're not hiring a sex, you're hiring a person and individuals can match requirements for almost all types of position regardless of sex.
I think it’s sexists, but I also think that targeted advertising should be allowed as long as Uber hires women drivers who want to drive for Uber.
I think there will certainly be some issues if it becomes a trend though. I mean, most programmers are men, most doctors are women and if you target your adds based on that, you’ll only further increase the current norms.
Frankly targeting sex makes little sense for most jobs, doesn’t it? It’s be more reasonable to target interests, qualifications, education and current job status. I mean, Facebook knows what job and car you have, it might even know how much you drive, wouldn’t it make sense for Uber to target that instead of sex? But maybe they combine it all.
In relation to your last question: in many countries (not sure about the US) jobs like au pair, house maid, babysitter, caretaker, are explicitly exempted from nondiscrimination rules.
The issue is that under the law, you as an employer are not allowed to make a hiring related choice that in any way discriminates against a protected class (with some exceptions discussed on other comments). You might expect to only get applications from men, but legally you can not target men specifically.
The inclusion of 'women and people of color strongly encouraged to apply' is actually walking a fine legal line when you go by the word of the law, and is only accepted as it is encouraging what are more-often the discriminated-against groups within the protected classes. It follows the sprite of the law, which is to protect the discriminated-against groups within the protected classes.
I wonder how fine that legal line is when an outreach program is using Facebook advertisement. How common is that they tick that gender box rather than adding some line of "women and people of color strongly encouraged to apply".
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII, which was codified as Subchapter VI of Chapter 21 of title 42 of the United States Code, and was later extended by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
It is in your best interest to hire the best person for the job, but if you determine who is "best" based on inclusion or exclusion from a protected class then you are illegally discriminating (except for in some specific cases such as the sex and race of actors, and where disabilities can not be reasonably accommodated for).
Protected Class: The groups protected from the employment discrimination by law. These groups include men and women on the basis of sex; any group which shares a common race, religion, color, or national origin; people over 40; and people with physical or mental handicaps. Every U.S. citizen is a member of some protected class, and is entitled to the benefits of EEO law. However, the EEO laws were passed to correct a history of unfavorable treatment of women and minority group members. [0]
It's the term used to denote the groups protected by a number of different laws, the individual laws describe the classes specifically. This is all well established law and terminology, and anyone who takes part in any hiring process in the US should be versed in all of this.
> why would I not choose the most effective form of advertising for me?
To put a slightly different spin on things, in the US young black men are more likely to be perpratrators of crime[0], so should police spend more time investigating young black men over other demographics?
[0] whether this is due to racial prejudice or other systemic matters doesn't matter.
The problem is that these "immutable characteristics" are very hard to assess subjectively by humans.
Say you divide a group of candidates into evenly split groups based on something. Gender, age, race - your pick. You'd end up with an uneven split even if your entire pool has the same qualification level and you let someone hire from it "by merit". And I don't mean it'll be random, there will be a clear distribution given enough samples.
How else do you suggest we solve this issue besides affirmative action?
Having a culture conscious of bias is good, but I'd rather see some progress before the end of the century. You know, cause old people exist and you can't really change this culture too fast, especially not if you factor in reactionaries that are sort of standing in the way and can't see the issue (hint: it's because you don't have the issue).
Old people are bad? I don't have issues? Because I'm a particular color and ethnicity you've attached to me?
My comment is about education that is actual education. For example, let's teach kids math in a form that has worked for centuries. Not this new common core stuff. Let's teach students a more complete history, versus the cartoonish narrative that has produced these brainwashed masses. And the current cultural narrative is part of that problem. Check out Thomas Sowell or Camille Paglia. They have some ideas on education based in empirical evidence, not based on what sounds good.
And how has there not been progress? If you look at what the media says I can understand that impression. But walk around a city and you'll see people of all colors, ethnicities, wearing suits working in offices, etc.
I live in a world where, if you put your mind to it and work hard, you can get closer to where you want to be. No matter who you are. And no matter where you came from.
I don't walk around the world putting people in victim/oppressor categories based on someone's outward appearance. That's dark. And to me, more a reflection on the viewer than the actual people they claim to know which category they fit in.
Last I checked both articles have extensive "References" sections. Unless you actually like what you read, in that case I'll just have to deal with that. Unfortunate that stuck up people like you exist, but I'm not going to change that on this bastion of techbro-ism. (I know you people hate that word, so I made sure to use it)
Yes, because otherwise you have companies hiring 10 year olds to work in sweat shops. Don't act like government rules for fair employment are only good when it benefits you.
Not sure what you're on about, but nice strawman. I am not referring to government regulations to prevent child labor. I am talking about the systematic discrimination the government takes on when making purchasing decisions: https://www.govspend.com/2017/11/17/government-contracting-o...
It is patent discrimination to evaluate government contracts from certain groups as having lower costs, simply because the business owners come from certain groups. That is discrimination, and it has nothing to do with child labor laws.
>why would I not choose the most effective form of advertising for me?
Because it's illegal? Advertising jobs only to white men hurts society. A modern democracy understands that freedom loving people need access to jobs. So yeah, you are prevented from infringing on others' freedoms.
So the argument, as I see it here, is that companies should be forced to spend additional resources advertising to demographics that they have identified as not strong leads in their campaigns, so that overly virtuous people can feel happy about them spending money on something that likely won't concern them in the slightest.
Righto.
If the article's title was "Facebook is letting job advertisers target only women" or "Facebook is letting job advertisers target only people in their ideal demographic", I wonder if the discussion would be any different here.
It has nothing to do with virtue, it's a matter of Facebook and its advertisers violating the written law. EEOC exists due to law, and all employers are required to abide by it. If you violate equal opportunity employment by discriminating for any one of a number of protected classes, you are acting unlawfully. Facebook should not be so openly allowed to violate the law, and for doing so, the individuals in the corporation as well as the corp itself should be charged with their crimes and assessed fines.
The parent post allude to the fact that many companies do already advertise exclusively to a single gender in the name of outreach. You can not just throw around the idea of "protected classes" to mean that discrimination is acceptable except when it benefit men.
If targeted job advertisement based on gender is illegal then let make that the new norm. The extreme end on both side of the so called gender war will be against it and hopefully the majority in the middle will be in favor of it. I strongly doubt however that the law can currently be used to push this since so much of out reach programs have been using targeted job advertisement.
It doesn't necessarily break the law though, as far as I can tell.
There are exceptions in the law for when the person's sex genuinely matters. If you're hiring male models/dancers/actors/medical test subjects, for instance, then you're exempted. As far as I could see in my skim-read of the article, it makes no mention of such cases.
You're conflating your vernacular interpretation of the popular name of the law with the text of the law itself.
Regardless of how you interpret the phrase "equal opportunity", the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforces the full text of employment discrimination laws, and not just their titles.
> But real-life demographic analysis shows that men are overwhelmingly the qualified demographic for this role.
Are you familiar with the phrase, "Lies, damn lies, and statistics?" I've seen some of these real-life demographic analyses that support this kind of conclusion, and they have an overwhelming tendency to be utter bunk.
> Advertising to that demographic is not against the law
In fact, it's been specifically prohibited in the USA since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Huh? The ads are shown to only men. So how are they “not hidden” from women?
If I were a woman, I wouldn’t even be aware these ads exist. And if I did, in order to see them I would need to tell Facebook I’m a man. That means to me the ads are pretty damn hidden.
> companies should be forced to spend additional resources advertising to demographics that they have identified as not strong leads
Leaving aside judgement of the merits of such policy, this is basically already the case in real estate post Fair Housing legislation.
Among other things advertisements for housing, to the extent they include human models, must show models that proportionally represent the population of the community, not the population of the desired buyers.
Suppose I determine that advertising my software developer position to white people provides a better return than to black people. Wouldn't it be unfair to only advertise to whites?
In some ways this is similar to how an employer cannot ask a potential employee if she is pregnant. Allowing the question might maximise the company's profit but would be considered unfair to women.
Blaming Facebook muddies the water a bit. Ultimately the companies advertising on Facebook broke the law when they checked the wrong boxes. Facebook should; however, make that information public knowledge by allowing the public to see the advertising parameters of any given ad if they are curious but to my knowledge, no law requires it. Maybe it's time to start having a conversation about the need advertising transparency.
Is the ad illegal or is the practice of hiring only men or only women illegal? What if there were separate men-oriented and women-oriented ad creatives that they wanted target to each group?
Male only employment ads are illegal, but does that mean Facebook should have to change their UI for each case where the rules around advertising are different, or should people posting advertising be required to follow the law?
Facebook needs to stop posting illegal ads, even if users request illegal ads. It's not my problem to decide how Facebook ensures that they obey the law -- it's their problem. Even if its really, really hard, it's still their problem. If it's impossible to achieve with technology, Facebook should leave the advertising business.
Exactly. Facebook can solve this problem, but they don't. Same as political ads. "If we don't know about it, you can't sue". Unfortunately I think governments are getting tired of that excuse.
Yes. Why should FB be exempt from laws that every other ad publisher has to follow. The local newspaper has self service ads but they have to review them to make sure they are legal.
The safe harbor protects sites whose users infringe copyright, if certain conditions are met. I don't think it applies to advertising.
An example of safe harbor protection would be something like a user uploading a copyrighted song without a site's knowledge. If the site did not know about it, did not benefit from it financially, and takes it down when they are told about it, safe harbor protections would probably apply.
In contrast, Facebook knows the content and targeting options of every ad that they publish, and makes money from the ads.
I believe you're thinking of OCILLA which is USC Section 512(c) [0].
You might want to look at USC Section 230 [1] which says "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
Facebook should make it much harder to use their product illegally. They can hide protected demographic filters when ads are of a protected nature, like jobs or housing.
This concept of law enforcement is a really slippery slope, trying to force companies to stop people from breaking the law, is a serious shift in the concept of freedom.
prohibit acts are allowed, and they are dealt with by punishing the wrong doers.
Turning a company's automated system into a judge of legal and illegal action just seems like a bad idea in the long run.
Though, it is seemingly a growing trend, I don't feel it will result in a improved world in the end.
The point of the parent is that it’s being asked to prevent/impede its customers from doing illegal things. That’s not a ridiculous thing to ask, but it’s very different from Facebook itself engaging in illegal activity.
Does Facebook know that these are employment ads? Should they add a checkbox to their ad posting system so that the user can tell them that they are advertising for a product or a job posting?
As another example - should Facebook be legally responsible if I use their service to send death threats to someone? If not, why is that case different?
Of course Facebook knows that they are running employment ads. They don't know _which_ ads are employment ads, because they are not paying anyone to look at the ILLEGAL advertisements they know that they are running.
"But having humans review ads doesn't scale!" says someone with a financial position in online advertising.
Meanwhile, the massive profits of the online advertising companies have forced them to 'pivot' into real estate holding companies, during a period of persistent underemployment and stagnant wage growth.
Yep. Nothing can be done. We have to wait for artificial intelligence to save the day. It would simply cut into profits too much to follow the law.
> If you commit a crime because somebody else asked you to do it, does that mean you didn’t break the law?
In many cases, the answer is no, you did not break the law.
The best example I have of this is DMCA, and copywrite law. It is perfectly legal for youtube to allow users to upload content that they don't have the rights to, as long as they follow the DMCA takedown process if requested.
Or to give another example, think about your phone lines. I am sure that many users engage in illegal behavior over the phone. But it is not the job of the phone company to listen in on your phone calls, to ensure that you are, I don't know, engaging in harassment or some other illegal phone activity.
Are you suggesting Facebook do that helpfully to aide their customers in avoiding mishaps? Or are you prescribing this be government ordained & required?
It can be simpler than that. The government has already ordained and required the laws. If Facebook publishes an illegal ad, the government should enforce those laws and punish Facebook.
It's up to Facebook to take whatever internal steps they deem necessary to prevent that from happening. The government doesn't need to decide what steps need to be taken -- it only needs to care about the outcome.
Why should FB get an exception for what’s been public law for 4 decades?
The local newspaper has a self service portal for classifieds. I don’t know about thier job ads, but they review their ads for rentals for violations of the Fair Housing Act.
Depends on the job. You won’t send a female cleaner in a male locker room.
Also some recruiter are explicitely trying to correct a gender imbalance and are therefore actively seeking female candidates. Does that become unethical to advertise to women?
That's a bad example. There are many jobs where men clean female locker rooms/restrooms and visa versa. But I agree with others (and I think you) that it isn't Facebook's responsibility legally to ensure it isn't possible for companies to break the law. Might be able to make a moral argument, but that's a different argument.
> There are only a handful of fields where women dominate.
I was curious if I could find some figures, so I did a quick Google search. While I can't vouch for the data used in this article, it seems your statement is incorrect, and quite strongly so
For those interested here is a link to The Code of Federal Regulations: Title 29 (Labor): Part 1604 “Guidelines On Discrimination Because of Sex” which describes the relevant legal requirements/interpretations pertaining to employer sex discrimination.
It is a violation of title VII for a help-wanted advertisement to indicate a preference, limitation, specification, or discrimination based on sex unless sex is a bona fide occupational qualification for the particular job involved. The placement of an advertisement in columns classified by publishers on the basis of sex, such as columns headed “Male” or “Female,” will be considered an expression of a preference, limitation, specification, or discrimination based on sex."
Seems to me like they're legally in the clear, as long as the ad itself doesn't contain any indication. Same as only advertising in a publication whose readers are 99% male - Google's gender metrics aren't even that precise.
Surely Facebook having an option to show only ads to a certain gender falls under the provision
The placement of an advertisement in columns classified by publishers on the basis of sex, such as columns headed “Male” or “Female,” will be considered an expression of a preference, limitation, specification, or discrimination based on sex.
Facebook publishes the ad, and their target gender option surely falls in under "column classification".
I'm sure there's a team of lawyers that pored over the exact language used and made sure it skirts the laws; they say "we strongly encourage", not "we prefer".
They're equivalent. People strongly encourage things they prefer. It would be a very Kafkaesque judgement that one can strongly encourage a certain gender to apply and not violate that statute.
Of course, it's also the outcome I'd expect, but biased application of the law is a separate issue.
I agree with the other person who replied. Couldn't they also say that they need women for pat downs of women, etc? So they have a legitimate reason for encouraging women to apply?
I’ve never tried to place a FB ad, so I don’t know what the interface looks like. But wouldn’t it be fairly straightforward on their end to disable gender (or other protected classes) as options for targeting when it comes to job or housing ads? Or are advertisers not required to choose a “category” for their ad, in the way that on Craigslist, you have to select a category to post in?
Even if there is no such categorization, it’s not a difficult NLP challenge to detect that the content of an ad is for job hiring, or to know that the advertiser is based in the U.S. FB could implement a warning/reminder dialog similar to how GMail tells you that you haven’t actually included an attachment yet.
I once applied for a job as a porn actor (at a flatmate's joking suggestion). They replied saying they only wanted women, but weren't allowed to say that in the ad. That seemed a silly waste of time.
People here need to be reminded that a job ad is not the same as a product ad. A job is what you do with your life, not some stuff you may want to buy.
Society tells you: you should get a career and climb up the social ladder. Don't worry, every one has the same chances. But then the same society goes around your back and only tells your male friends that there may be an opportunity here or there? wtf?
If I was a female developer, or a male nurse, I'd be fucking furious to know that this was happening.
There are definitely some jobs that require the person to be male or female, or white, or jewish, or old, whatever. But that's not the norm. Whether or not it is a Facebook duty to remove the box is debatable, but if you are a recruiter and you tick the male box, you're clearly open to lawsuits.
Whilst targeting individual groups can certainly lead to inequalities there is the problem of tailoring ads to an audience. One way a company may wish to make their ads more appealing is by showing relatable people in adverts.
If a company is running two variations of the same job advert, one featuring women and one featuring men, distributing coverage across the two variations evenly, then is there still an issue? I would argue not, yet introducing a non-gender targeting rule would make this impossible to do and could in fact have the opposite affect to what was desired by the regulation.
Yes it would still be a problem. I can’t speak for job postings but I can speak for real estate. There are certain things that you are not allowed to say in advertisement or as a real estate agent.
Even in jobs, you would be walking a very fine line if an obviously pregnant woman walked in and you started mentioning that the place you work is great for mothers.
This sort of thing ought to disturb more people than it seems to - it should be really, really obvious when you're breaking the law, and it should be something that you can only do with actual harmful intent. This sort of thing goes a step worse, though, and actually makes _good_ intent unlawful.
I don’t think it’s prima facie illegal to mention that, but it does open you up to a discrimination lawsuit. The chances of winning might be slim, but why take the chance?
Crossing the line would be “This job requires a lot of travel,are you sure you could handle it with a newborn?”
It is also illegal for an employer to recruit new employees in a way that discriminates against them because of their race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.
For example, an employer's reliance on word-of-mouth recruitment by its mostly Hispanic work force may violate the law if the result is that almost all new hires are Hispanic.
> For example, an employer's reliance on word-of-mouth recruitment by its mostly Hispanic work force may violate the law if the result is that almost all new hires are Hispanic.
I think the key here is may. Nothing I have read seems to indicate that targeting men only violates the EEOC rules. The rule only seems to be if the result is almost all new hires are X.
What if we had a good pool of men working, and the company was a perfect example of diversity but found that it lacked women needed for a spot to keep their 50/50 ratio. Now let's say they had a lot of qualified men candidates already lined up. Why should the be forced to put ads out for men they know they won't hire because the next 5 hires are going to be women to keep their diversity ratio?
Side note (off topic), I was unaware of the EEOC rules on this sort of thing and am a bit shocked knowing that on HN and various places on the internet I have seen people promoting jobs that flat out say "POC or Woman applicants will only be considered". It Think Evergreen and UCLA recently had job postings with this type of wording recently. How is that not a EOC violation?
> thefacebook.com allows for targeted advertisement on the basis of any (or a combination of) the following parameters:
> College/University, Sexual Orientation, Degree Type, Zip Code, Concentration, Dating interests, Courses taken, Personal Interests, Class Year, Clubs and Jobs, House/Dormitory, Political Bent, Age, Number of friends, Gender, Site Usage.
So blatant targeted advertisement has always been part of Facebook. Lots of (now wealthy) investors and early adopters had no problem that its users were being targeted on the basis of their sexuality.
The market will go where it wants to go: Instead of explicitly targeting men, you now target people that liked WWE, Family Guy, study business school, and searched for "hackernews". Or you make the advertisement itself appealing to men (and take the small loss on an irrelevant audience).
There's a difference between the types of advertisement. It's okay to target ads based on gender if you're advertising shirts or shampoo or whatever. It's illegal if you're advertising jobs.
The more I think about this topic, the more I come to the conclusion there is one simple solution to all the targeted-ad related problems - at least from the platforms point of view: Make all data about ads public. Who is targeted, how many people are reached, what other campaigns does a company run on that platform. Let anyone see all the data and then don't blame the platform but the advertiser. Of course this would only work if at least the big ones (Google and Facebook) are be on board. Regulations which force all platforms to publish this data could minimize the competitive disadvantage that would otherwise result from companies wanting to keep this stuff secret and selecting platforms accordingly.
Politics, statistics and stereotypes have a reality.
Sometimes you don't want to be politically correct, and you go along with what things actually are, what people want and what is already working. A company is not there to solve stereotypes.
Just look at the proportion of women who can read code, or are actually interested in dealing with code. That's an issue. Same thing goes for people who do construction work, miners, the military, etc.
I totally admit that it's a cynical opinion. There's are a lot of things civilization can do to define what humans do and how they behave. Gender might have deep implications, that cannot be changed by civilization and principles of equality.
"for the sake of this thread I propose to assume that this behavior is legal" - it's not, in USA it's illegal to discriminate genders and some other groups in certain types of advertising (jobs and IIRC housing).
>Sometimes you don't want to be politically correct, and you go along with what things actually are, what people want and what is already working. A company is not there to solve stereotypes.
And that is why we have anti-descriminatory legislation.
Even if there are differences, generalizations will overemphisize them. Minorities are overlooked and you cater to the lowest common denominator. It's easier to sell people a conforming stereotype then to provide a diversity of options. It's cheaper to exclude by category, but it is deeply unfair to everyone for whom it doesn't apply, and even if in mant important ways you are fairly normal and benefit from it, most people are in some kind of minority.
"Sometimes you don't want to be politically correct, and you go along with what things actually are, what people want and what is already working. A company is not there to solve stereotypes."
And sometimes you'll only trust a man for the job for no good reason.
Programming was a women's job, almost exclusively, until the last half century when it became a hobby and a lucrative profession. Men pushed the women out on both fronts.
You are no Grace Hopper, and you are in no position to tell women what they can't do.
Care to show actual statistics about this, I'm genuinely curious.
> You are no Grace Hopper, and you are in no position to tell women what they can't do.
I'm not telling anyone what to do, but it's hard to unroot stereotypes and even more difficult to go against our natural behaviors. If minorities are complexed because they're in smaller number, what is there to do?
I would like to tell young women to enroll in computer science curriculum though. Is that a good advice?
Marketing segmentation wasn’t really used at all until the mid-70’s to deal with a period declining sales in the US economy. Old people weren’t even treated as a specific segment beyond 65+ until like 1990.
A very productive world existed without any significant marketing targeting other than geolocation and some other rough measures. Perhaps we are returning to such a state of things.
For a moment there, I thought the ad by Motor Institute of America shown on the page of Popular Mechanics you linked to, was also present in your second link to the The Ladies Home Journal, albeit with a different ad copy.
Another angle on the issue: If some company is doing something that is suboptimal (such as excluding a viable gender employee group) they will eventually be priced out of the market by competitors (because their inefficiencies will remove their competitiveness).
I wonder how many of these things we should legislate against the "bad guy" vs. just ensure the proliferation/competitiveness of the "Good guys"?
The whole "priced out of the market" idea is nonsense. That argument isn't even being made by Andreesen here though. The competitive disadvantage is true, by definition. It doesn't make sense to discriminate from a market perspective. The article only supports this: Greenspan got a competitive advantage by hiring women, because they were cheaper. The free market punishes discrimination. It doesn't end discrimination, but it gives an incentive for hiring women.
If I identified as a woman, I frankly wouldn't be so worried about earning a bit less than my male counterparts, but rather about not being hired at all, because of all the legal risks associated with hiring women because of anti-discrimination laws. Nobody is getting sued for discrimination about firing some white boy.
Even if they remove the explicit gender category in their advertising interface, it seems relatively trivial to find proxies for gender (or race, or age, for that matter) to target a specific subgroup of people with your ads.
It's possible to algorithmically bias the ad-targeting algorithms in such a way to achieve parity in whatever sensitive attribute you are concerned about, but that will come at the expense of utility of the targeting (since you will have to show it to more people who you actually don't want to target, just to achieve gender/race/age equality) - of course, that might not be so bad if your hypothesis is that the advertiser has a bad mental model of his target group to begin with and you think that Facebook should force him to make it more egalitarian.
I don't think that will happen though, Facebook might remove explicit gender targeting, but I doubt it will do much to help with biased ads since people will just use proxies for gender etc. instead.
I find the title a bit misleading - more so puts the blame in the 'wrong' place.
Let me explain briefly. Facebook allows advertisers to pay a rate per advertisement displayed. Why shouldn't Facebook 'let' their paying customers show the ads to those they are interested in. AKA why would they pay Facebook to show their ad to people they are not interested in?
That being said - I've followed most of the discussion...and there are a lot of strong points. I just think that the title shouldn't that Facebook LET them advertise in a certain way - it should be the company that is advertising the positions only to men - although they certainly could be targeting men through that channel - and targeting women through another channel - with differing types of ads all together.
> I just think that the title shouldn't that Facebook LET them advertise in a certain way - it should be the company that is advertising the positions only to men
But that wouldn't get the clicks that propublica wants. Add facebook to the title and you get X more clicks.
Also, most jobs aren't even advertised. Especially the good jobs, like those at propublica. Seems like a none story to me but the problem is that the news has to make news to make money. Yes, even nonprofits have to make money.
There's a lot of countries we're talking about here (and I'm honestly surprised an adult who has hired someone wouldn't be aware) but from a 5 second DuckDuckGo:
> The only thing the employer has to do is avoid criteria which touch on race, religion, gender, age or disability.
Placing ads limited by gender could still be viewed as limiting criteria. IANAL: go look up lawyers who have discussed ad targeting strategy as being in violation of labour laws many times before.
It's marketing... demographics matter. Targeted ads are cost effective and efficient. What next? can't target women when advertising feminine products? or men when selling condoms? Are we really this bored to even be discussing this?
There is no slippery slope argument. Restricting discriminatory advertising for jobs and real estate has been established law for decades. Just because it’s “on the internet”, doesn’t make any difference.
The most prominent organization named is Uber, who it's safe to assume is running multiple ad's at a time, which probably includes some targeted at men and some targeted at women (even if it's as simple as changing out the stock photo).
Oh, and "The Pennsylvania State Police, for example, boosted a post targeted to men ..." well of course, why would they pay to advertise to females when they don't need to? You should go research the demographics of police (or visit your local donut shop): almost exclusively male, because most females don't want to do it. And if a female does want to... well, then she should go apply?
> almost exclusively male, because most females don't want to do it.
Needless generalization; in the less violent Netherlands, there's plenty of women in law enforcement, and you often see both men and women together patrolling. They are actively hired because they bring different traits to the table to de-escalate a situation.
Of course, the US is much different, much more violent, much less safe for police, and it's a self-reinforcing system.
Funny thing is, if an employer sets out an advertisement targeted at X, then when you show up at the interview the employer knows X about you, without you being aware of it.
(Except of course if X is something obvious like gender).
I see a bunch of claims, but is this actually illegal in the US? More specifically, is it illegal to selectively advertise a job provided that the business doesn't profile during actual hiring?
If I post job listings in upper-class white neighborhoods only, would that be illegal?
What if I had one ad that targeted men and another which targeted women? What if the male version was designed to be successful while the female version was designed to discourage response?
Yes, USA laws require that jobs be advertised on a nondiscriminatory basis.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm is a decent summary. All the examples you provide would be illegal. As the provided example states "For example, an employer's reliance on word-of-mouth recruitment by its mostly Hispanic work force may violate the law if the result is that almost all new hires are Hispanic."
Linkedin verses common resume wisdom:
In the US the conventional wisdom is you are never supposed to put a self photo in a resume (though that is common in other countries). However in Linkedin you cant achieve top status without a professional headshot. Plus that headshot appears as a thumbnail in many functions of Linkedin. So you are prejudiced by your gender, race and age just like a common Tinder profile.
There's a few reasonable reasons why FB should allow gender-specific job ad campaigns:
- Employers will likely see better ROI on their ad-spend by creating separate ad campaigns for every gender, with copy/creatives optimized for the target demo
- Employers may see that FB ads are ineffective for a specific gender, eg. fb ads are good for finding male candidates, while other marketing channels (radio, tv ads, etc) work better for female candidates.
Given these examples, I wouldn't blame Fb for allowing gender-specific ads. The onus should be on the employer to reach out to candidates of all genders throughout their recruiting campaigns, with gender balance when you aggregate efforts across different mediums.
It's interesting that the headline and article seems to be focused on the advertisers targeting ads towards men when there were also instances where the ads were targetted towards only women. Shouldn't those both be equally wrong?
And I don't see anything inherently wrong with targeted towards a specific gender so long as that targeted is compensated for elsewhere in your recruiting strategy. Lots of magazines are read by more people of one sex than the other, so if you are recruiting in those magazines, I think it can make sense to make up the difference by using Facebook.
Well partly it's neater to write the headline and grab attention, but partly it's because their research seems to be indicating that this is being used to target only men. For example:
>Our survey of 91 Uber ads found just one targeting only women; three did not target a specific sex.
I came across this tweet[0] the other day and in the replies there seemed to be many discussions sparked around the legalities of advertising / hiring based on immutable traits. From what I could gather (not a lawyer) based on what laws people were citing, is that it's "okay" to advertise in this manor, however it is not legal to actually make the hire taking into account these traits.
In the case of this tweet, I'm not sure how I feel about this, as it's clear what their goal is:
> empower and train black Computer Science students to land their first job
which seems fine. However this goal can't be achieved if a white person ends up being hired. So does the ad imply that they will only hire a black computer science student? It seems like a bit of a grey area to me.
And while I understand the article linked is about targeting only men for jobs and not for people of colour, they are similar on the basis that it is traits we have no control over.
One other point I'd like to make here, is that IF people see this as Facebook "allowing" to filter by immutable traits, in this case Twitter is essentially doing the same, by allowing these kinds of posts.
> I think the problem is with the employer, not the platform
No, the platform gives the tools to specifically filter by sex. Facebook is enabling sexual discrimination.
> every local custom
euphemism
You mean the law, the very thing that will get your in legal troubles if you break it. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to discriminate by sex when it comes to employment in US, and Facebook is an american company.
> No, the platform gives the tools to specifically filter by sex. Facebook is enabling sexual discrimination.
Like any ad seller, Facebook offers displaying ads based on demographics. This is a basic requirement for many advertisers, because a lot of products happen to be bought exclusively by one gender. You have a right to buy tampons, you don't have a right to be displayed advertisements for tampons.
Even if there were legal problems with those particular Uber ads, it's Uber's responsibility to follow the law, it's not Facebooks responsibility to screen every ad for possible infringements.
I disagree. If they know they are hosting employment ads, they need to be required to perform to legal standards. That means that, minimum, an employment ad should be seen differently than a regular ad by the algorithm and by the backend - no demographic weighting can be allowed within the protected classes; unless the employer applies for a BFOQ, makes it clear what that BFOQ is, and has it authorized by either an EEOC rep or an employment law professional within the ad platform (in this case Facebook). Otherwise they're clearly in violation of the law and knowingly so.
Just as an FYI, in the past few hours there have been reports on some big Facebook advertising groups people are getting notifications about their anti-discrimination policies regarding jobs. As a matter of fact, they've, for a while, had an extra step for advertisers to verify they're in compliance for housing, lending, and career opportunities.
What if employers create a different ad for men and for women, targeting both, but appealing to the target more effectively? It's often cited that the wording of a neutral sounding job ad can have a huge effect on the percentage of women that will apply.
There's nothing illegal about what facebook is doing, although there is potential for misuse.
In the following, I assume either pay-per-impression, or pay-per-click with a limited pool size (ex. 500 views limit per day). In the former I assume the "cost" is monetary, in the latter I assume the "cost" is temporal.
Genuinely curious about this, what if somebody is posting an ad for hiring labourers (brick layers, etc.)? Do they pay the cost by also targeting women? What about targeting ads for hiring beauticians at females? Is that wrong? Should the company pay the cost to also advertise to men in the off-chance that they catch one of the very few male beauticians?
To me it makes sense that advertisers, regardless of what they are advertising (job, product, service, etc.) should be able to target the demographics that they believe will achieve the desired outcome. Obviously this has few exceptions such as targeting cigarettes, alcohol, etc. at minors.
Are there any good arguments against this?
Of note: The subject of this topic seems a bit biased, why not "Facebook is letting job advertisers target specific genders?"
Do people find jobs through advertisements? I don't think I've ever landed a job that way. It's always been through referral or researching companies that do interesting work and reaching out to the right people there.
It certainly works best how you describe it for highly skilled positions in fields that the majority of HN works in. The examples in this article such as trucking are less skilled, lower pay positions in somewhat undesirable roles. Especially in the current job marketplace these employers are desperate to attract candidates.
What if you want to make two separate ad campaigns? One targeted to men and one to women. This has yielded the best results in a previous company. We hired x5 the women (tech industry) just because we changed the wording a bit.
Google lets you target male/female demo's and, to my knowledge, always has. Literally every advertiser does this and always has. I am not sure why this article even exists.
With demographic targeting in Google Ads, you can reach a
specific set of potential customers who are likely to be
within a particular age range, gender, parental status,
or household income. For instance, if you run a fitness
studio exclusively for women, demographic targeting could
help you avoid showing your ads to men.
No one's sued them yet. It's kind of like the affirmative action lawsuits, where it's a widespread topic but like only one person is actually pressing the issue in court.
This is unambiguously illegal and Facebook could stop doing this anytime it wants. Craigslist reminds its users about anti-discrimination laws before they post and provides a means for users to flag illegal ads.
Right now the targeting information for an ad is not disclosed to the recipient, so it's not possible for an end user to know if a given ad is illegal or not unless there's discriminatory information directly in the copy, which is pretty rare.
If you click the three dots on the top right of an ad in the newsfeed, you should be able to press 'Why am I seeing this' to see an explanation of the targeting for an ad. I can see one on my newsfeed that says:
> One reason you're seeing this ad is that Castore Sportswear wants to reach people who have visited their website or used one of their apps. This is based on customer information provided by Castore Sportswear.
> There may be other reasons you're seeing this ad, including that Castore Sportswear wants to reach people ages 18 and older who live in the United Kingdom. This is information based on your Facebook profile and where you've connected to the internet.
Is it hard to think of a single job posting that would only be available to only men OR women? Entertainment jobs are especially constrained: Exotic male dancer, exotic female dancer, specific roles in tv/movies/plays, Hooters waitress, etc.
OK you got me, exotic dancers didn't cross my mind xD
TBH it does seem a little discriminatory that a place gets to decide "all our waitresses are women", or "only women dance here", but I can see how industry's could be grandfathered in...
I wonder if job discrimination suits are ever going to be filed against Hollywood. They literally choose employees at a minimum by race, age and gender. Actual skill is the last thing they look at.
I sincerely hope you are wrong, even if I understand your point. On the other hand, the case would still be just as open-and-shut. Violating both the law and EEOC regulation doesn't matter if you're doing it for one side or the other. Unless you can prove that sex is a BFOQ, you are not allowed to recruit or advertise in a way that weights the job on one side of the scale or the other.
Perhaps a silly question but why is gender (and perhaps ethnicity) the only type of discrimination everybody worries about when it comes to Facebook? Shouldn't we extend this to all the ways people differ?
For example, why should somebody who loves horse-riding not get the same job offerings as somebody who loves computer-programming, in all cases?
And why can employers exclude people who are interested in pregnancy-related things, or people with dangerous hobbies like basejumping?
Can't we start a petition for a ban on targeted advertisement, so we can stop this madness altogether? It would also solve a lot of privacy related problems.
Hooter's gets in with a loophole. Their waitresses are technically "entertainers", which means that their cup size could actually be considered a BFOQ. It's a weird middle space that exists because Congress in the '60s was concerned about Hollywood and Broadway.
Not that I agree or disagree with the practice I can't help to see how people are so quick to want to talk about limiting what looks very much like free speech.
If I wanted to spread a message person to person on the street. I think I would find it odd if the government had a say in who I told the message to.
All this seems to be I'd a automated system of doing just that. So if I knew of a job at company X and I decided to tell my buddy John (cis gender male) but did not tell Jenny (cis grander female) would I be breaking any sort of rule? Or would I be forced to always find at lest one person of the opposite gender to also inform of the job?
In any case why do we care what Facebook is doing. They are simply a tool. U less you are suggesting that advertisers should not be able to do anything based off gender...
This law is nothing new to digital advertisers. The New York Times is also forbidden by law to advertise job or housing ads that discriminate against protected classes in its classifieds page, and this has been an uncontroversial state of affairs for decades. Facebook is being asked to play by the same rules as everyone else.
> What next? Hold AT&T culpable for providing internet to these advertisers?
If AT&T is otherwise interacting with the content (e.g. throttling or zero-rating based on it being an ad), I don't see a problem with that.
Traditionally, common carriers were protected under the premise that they didn't discriminate based on content. In this respect, I think internet carriers are putting themselves in a precarious position in not supporting net neutrality.
Once a carrier shows that it can (and does) discriminate content, what makes it different from a publisher like a newspaper?
I bet no one would blink an eye if Facebook allowed targeting jobs to only women. People really need to get over themselves, men and women inherently have different strengths, and so there are just some things that only men should do.
"should"? Men and women have different strengths on average, not on an individual level, so your conclusion that some things should be done by men only is unsound.
No, there are a bunch of areas that have specific laws prohibiting gender discrimination. Employment is one of them, housing and credit also have similar laws, but not most consumer goods and services.
If this headline was changed to "Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Women" this wouldn't be news and it would be hailed as the most progressive move of the century. With that, this isn't news, and definitely doesn't belong on the front page of Hacker News.
It is unimaginable to me that Facebook or any company should ever be obligated to show ads to anyone for any reason. Don't use Facebook as a job search platform. Facebook is just a website, you don't have to use it for everything. The fact that some people are not receiving ads on Facebook, in any sane world, has got to be the sole prerogative of Facebook. Nobody pays money to receive ads on Facebook, there is nothing to lose by just uninstalling the app.
Facebook should offer a "Premium Ads" program where you pay a monthly subscription to see all the ads discriminatory advertisers weren't willing to show you on their own dime!
This is a situation where you must ask yourself the very difficult question of what is more important, individual freedom or equality?
I think it goes beyond egalitarianism, because I certainly think any female who wants to become a highly-paid programmer should be able to do so simply by building merit, without any additional barriers.
I also think that any person, male or female, has the right to decide what demographics their private company is composed of.
The extreme of this, a world where all high-paying jobs are dished out by misogynists, is definitely a problem that needs to be solved, but I don't think we are actually living in that world currently.
Yes, it surely is a situation where this question should be asked, however the question has been asked and "we the people" have decided (and written into law) that in this type of scenarios equality overrides individual freedom.
In particular, it's been decided that in many cases (IIRC it starts to apply if the company has more than 15 employees) any person, male or female, does not have the right to decide what demographics their private company is composed of. That's it. This is the similar to "the right to swing your fist ends at my nose"; there is an inherent conflict between ability to choose demographics in your company and the ability of all demographics to get a fair job, we can't have both. We considered that this is a problem that needs to be solved and that such restrictions are going to be (part of) a solution. We may make different choices in future, but that's the one we currently have.
To paraphrase Judge Dredd on this one, The Law is what's most important. The law is written to oppose injustice and as part of doing so, inequity Follow the law. Work to have it changed if you think your public persona can survive fighting the EEOC's existence and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But follow the law first whether you like it or not, whether it's "profitable" or not.
Would this be different if, for example, Facebook was targeting people for job ads based on "people who like action movies" or "people who like romance novels" (I'm stereotyping here, but just assume you pick a category that ends up being a decent proxy for gender)?