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Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

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Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#171
post #162

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, m…

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.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" § 1604.5 Job opportunities advertising. 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 con…

This does imply the TSA are breaking the law given the story above about how they "strongly encourage" women to apply.

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".

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#173
post #7

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 differ…

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.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#174
post #162

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, m…

>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.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#175
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.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#177

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…

> 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.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Duolingo has a policy of only recruiting from schools that have an above-average percent of women in their CS program. How do you feel about that?

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.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#179
post #7

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 differ…

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…

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.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Duolingo has a policy of only recruiting from schools that have an above-average percent of women in their CS program. How do you feel about that?

> 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).

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