Wow, I didn't expect to see CapitalOne or Edward Jones on that list. I kind of figured it would be a bunch of smaller companies that were either ignorant of the law or, more likely, used to playing fast and loose without consequences.
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Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
31–40 of 487 posts
Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but you don't control if a man or an old person can buy the magazine or not.
While true, its a bit of a nitpick and misses the point GP made.
No. If you place an ad on Facebook for housing and choose to exclude people who identify as "black", there's no way for those people to find your ad, save for creating a new Facebook account and pretending to be white.
Anyone is welcome to purchase a copy of Ebony magazine. It's targeted, but it's not exclusive.
Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
#33So does this mean that targeted ads are now considered discrimination?
Targeted ads for some things, like jobs or housing, are considered discrimination. Ads for most products can be targeted.
What is the difference between those classes of goods? What non-arbitrary rule should we use as a society to determine if a product/service can be targeted or not? Seems to me that every time this subject comes up, an arbitrary list of things are considered protected by whoever is making that point.
Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if there was anything deliberate here. It's possible the companies targeted the jobs ads with factors or attributes that were correlated with younger men by the Facebook algorithm.
It’s interesting to imagine a hypothetical. Suppose a company chose an ad targeting segment with perfect 50/50 historical probability of a viewer being of either traditional male / female gender identity given they are in the segment. Now suppose through some weird fluke, the ads are actually only delivered to people of one single gender classification. Has the company done everything required of them by trying to ta…
For your examples of intent vs actual net targeting, it is not unreasonable to expect that an employer check the actual results of their targeting selections and ensure that they produce sound results.
"what is the underlying criteria that supposedly separates job listings from product listings?"
It is called Equal Opportunity Employment Law. If you want to employ someone, you MUST give equal opportunity, and cannot discriminate based on any of the protected classes (and ignorance of the law is no excuse).
Re your various characteristics, again, you MUST check your results for parity of results. Your example of "oh, I'm just targeting these particular characteristics and I had no idea that they happened to correlate 100% with young white males, oh my!", would provide such an easy work-aroud the EEO laws as to make them worthless. So, no, you can't do that.
Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
#35Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but:
If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. Not because they're less capable, but because there's less of them as a percentage of the population. I shouldn't have the government mandating that I can't tune my advertising campaign for ROI, which is basically the only point of running one if the first place.
However, on the other side of the coin that's pretty unfair because clearly there are good software engineers in those demographics and I'd be excluding them to save money.
I think both alternatives suck in different ways, but as a business I'd probably choose ROI over fair. It's all pretty hypothetical though, because Facebook ads are probably one of the worst ways I can think of to find candidates.
Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
#36Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but: If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. Not because they're less capable, but bec…
There's no reason the target-able category of "software engineer" can't include both genders (with representative ratios)
Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
#37Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but: If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. Not because they're less capable, but bec…
“It’s not cost efficient” isn’t a valid reason to discriminate against people, if you ask me.
An analogy to your justification: the most cost efficient thing to do with hazardous chemicals is to dump them down the drain.
Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but you don't control if a man or an old person can buy the magazine or not.
Serious question: How is that relevant though? Here is how I think about it: If my intention is to discriminate against men and publish an ad in a female magazine, sure, I cant control if a man buys and sees the ad or not. But discrimination was my intention to begin with regardless of how effective my efforts were. Besides, those efforts will be pretty effective. Instead of magazine advertising being 100% effective…
> Not only is this a slippery slope, but imo it flips everything in business on its head as having a target audience for your product or a service will be considered discriminatory!
No, it doesn't. If you determine that your target audience watches BET, and you decide to only advertise your product on BET, that's 100% legal.
If you prevented anyone but your target audience from using your service, and you end up discriminating against a protected class, that's a different story.
There are entirely different standards when it comes to hiring and employment.
Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
#39Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but: If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. Not because they're less capable, but bec…
“It’s not cost efficient” isn’t a valid reason to discriminate against people, if you ask me. An analogy to your justification: the most cost efficient thing to do with hazardous chemicals is to dump them down the drain.
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Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
#40Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but: If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. Not because they're less capable, but bec…
“It’s not cost efficient” isn’t a valid reason to discriminate against people, if you ask me. An analogy to your justification: the most cost efficient thing to do with hazardous chemicals is to dump them down the drain.
Women software engineers are a much smaller percentage of women than male software engineers are of men. That's pretty obvious to anyone who's ever worked in software.