Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

propublica.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 487 posts

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

#61

Post by joncrane »

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…

My Aunt wrote computer code into her 60s. This was up until at most 10 years ago. She has a degree in math and went back to school after being a SAHM and got a degree in computer science from a community college, and banged out code for about 15 years.

She coded circles around (and out-adulted) her younger colleagues.

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

#62

Post by NeedMoreTea »

conanbatt wrote: post #45
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.

> “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.

We have decided as nations and societies that some forms of economic discrimination are too damaging to permit. The details vary, but typically the things we can't easily change: race, nationality, age etc. Such discrimination is generally outlawed.

Someone lacking relevant market skills or education etc can go out and fix that.

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

#63

Post by chii »

conanbatt wrote: post #55
dangus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. None of the things you listed are examples of discrimination in the context of civil rights. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Perhaps I should also remind you that this isn’t 4chan.

You are using the legal definition of discrimination, and I am using the economics definition of discrimination.

and the courts only care about the legal definition.

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

#64

Post by nkrisc »

sturgill wrote: post #56
nkrisc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But should Ebony be allowed to market ads on Facebook and exclude white people? I honestly don’t know where I come down on this issue: it feels different to say, “we have a better ROI if we exclude certain demographics from seeing our ads” than to say “black people can’t eat at this diner.” Let’s take a company like REI: is it wrong for them to put their stores in places that are most profitable? Should luxury good c…

The short answer is: it depends. I don't think you'll run into much trouble in excluding women from your ads for beard care products, but you might of you're excluding them from your ads for housing.

I think you have to consider intent as well as outcome.

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

#65

Post by chii »

yardie wrote: post #13
tdurden wrote: post #4

So does this mean that targeted ads are now considered discrimination?

Yes. If you are, for example, placing rental or property ads that filter by race, age, or gender that is the official description of it.

and yet, by having a profile of the user, it is quite possible to "easily" find proxies for the above traits, and target those proxies instead, and thus dodge the legality issue. For example, using income.

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

#66

Post by dangus »

conanbatt wrote: post #55
dangus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. None of the things you listed are examples of discrimination in the context of civil rights. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Perhaps I should also remind you that this isn’t 4chan.

You are using the legal definition of discrimination, and I am using the economics definition of discrimination.

“Officer, you’re just using the legal definition of speeding!”

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

#68

Post by blondin »

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…

> Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this

ah! allow me to borrow this from time to time in the future :)

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

#69

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

mirimir wrote: post #46
eloff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some percentage of people-who-can-write-code probably have that listed as their occupation on Facebook, so target them.

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

#70

Post by 300bps »

aianus wrote: post #59
dragonwriter wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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.

Why is it legal to charge men more for car insurance? It’s definitely more profitable that way, but maybe so is the targeting in the article.

I worked for a car insurance company for ten years and the management would answer, “Because loss history shows that we pay more in claims for insured men.”

So that’s ok but for some reason if it were a particular race they wouldn’t think to charge people More by race so honestly I don’t know how to answer your question in a logically consistent manner.

Post reply on HN