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Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

propublica.org

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Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

#41

Post by eloff »

cameronbrown wrote: post #36
eloff wrote: post #35

Nothing 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)

If you can target software engineer on Facebook, then clearly you'd just do that.

If you're targeting more broadly for some stupid reason, then there's an economic incentive to target unfairly by demographic, just to narrow down the sheer number of irrelevant ad views by any means possible.

Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

#42

Post by dlp211 »

wesammikhail wrote: post #29
mav3rick wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

Facebook is way more like a newspaper than a target demo periodical but even when you put the Ad in Cosmo, you pay for the Ad impression no matter who views the Ad. You, as the advertiser have no control over that impression.

Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

#43

Post by mirimir »

wesammikhail wrote: post #33
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These aren't arbitrary judgment calls. There are laws.

And sure, the existence of those laws might be arbitrary. But the laws themselves are specific.

Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

#44

Post by fucking_tragedy »

wesammikhail wrote: post #33
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Seems to me that every time this subject comes up, an arbitrary list of things are considered protected by whoever is making that point.

It might feel that way to you, but it seems you haven't bothered to look into the history of why certain classes are protected against discrimination in housing, employment, medical treatment etc.

One of those reasons is to fight the tendency for discrimination to create second-class citizens[1]. Along with our society's past and its contemporary history, we also have a several millennia of written history to look back upon to see just how easily and willing we are to make life very bad for people who are discriminated against.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-class_citizen

Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

#45

Post by conanbatt »

dangus wrote: post #37
eloff wrote: post #35

Nothing 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.

> “It’s not cost efficient” isn’t a valid reason to discriminate against people, if you ask me.

It's literally the perfect reason to do discrimination. It is just like discriminating for having work experience, education, demonstrably market skills, etc.

Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

#46

Post by mirimir »

eloff wrote: post #41
cameronbrown wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason the target-able category of "software engineer" can't include both genders (with representative ratios)

If you can target software engineer on Facebook, then clearly you'd just do that. If you're targeting more broadly for some stupid reason, then there's an economic incentive to target unfairly by demographic, just to narrow down the sheer number of irrelevant ad views by any means possible.

I doubt that you could do that on Facebook. But on LinkedIn, you could obviously target people who claim experience in software engineering.

As you say, that might well effectively select for younger men. And as far as I know, that wouldn't be illegal. But you can't target by age, gender or disability. Because it's explicitly illegal.

Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

#47

Post by dangus »

eloff wrote: post #40
dangus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

The wording was unclear to me at first because it wasn’t explicit.

Anyway, I completely changed my comment to more closely go along with the point I want to be making.

Regardless, besides being unfair the idea that the policy is economically justified doesn’t seem to be immediately intuitive to me. It seems like you should advertise on subject matter for that kind of thing, e.g. people who watch EEVBlog would get an advertisement for electrical engineering jobs.

Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

#49

Post by dragonwriter »

dangus wrote: post #37
eloff wrote: post #35

Nothing 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.

> “It’s not cost efficient” isn’t a valid reason to discriminate against people, if you ask me.

Moreover, it's not, in general, a legal reason in the US to discriminate where a protected class is involved, including, in employment, age over 40 or gender.

Re: Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

#50

Post by zaroth »

analog31 wrote: post #21
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, though. When I buy a page in Cosmo or something, I'm doing that with the intent and result that mostly women will see it. If targeted ads were illegal, it's hard to see how any publication with non-representative demographics could sell ads at all.

The targeted ads in question relate to employment, which is governed by standards for what kinds of discrimination are legal and illegal.

Ok, so are you allowed to place employment ads in Cosmo?

Is it Ok just because it’s overwhelming likely to be women who see it, versus algorithmically targeting women?

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