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

131–140 of 487 posts

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

#131

Post by iikoolpp »

dragonwriter wrote: post #127
noobermin wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I bemoan the current form of identity politics because it allows an out. "I don't hate women, it's just disadvantageous to me to hire them," or, "I don't hate black people, I just won't rent to them because they statistically commit more crimes." And without an iota of malice in anyone's heart, relevant actors can reproduce the same exact disparities that perpetuate inequality. This is called systemic dis…

> This is why I bemoan the current form of identity politics because it allows an out. "I don't hate women, it's just disadvantageous to me to hire them," or, "I don't hate black people, I just won't rent to them because they statistically commit more crimes." That's direct discrimination, and I don't see how “the current form of identity politics” supposedly creates an “out” for it. Please elaborate.

It doesn't; it's just an irrelevant scapegoat.

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

#132

Post by ConradKilroy »

deogeo wrote: post #8
macspoofing wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

Being deliberate is not required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

As a wikipedian, wow thank you, I love learning vital descriptive terms.

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

#133

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

yawaramin wrote: post #103
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “It is called Equal Opportunity Employment Law.” Sorry I was not clear about this. I meant what are the sociological / philosophical reasons. Legal reasons get created at the whim of lobbying or party politics and don’t usually have much to do with protecting the welfare of people (even though they can selectively serve that purpose after the fact).

> I meant what are the sociological / philosophical reasons. Are you asking why it's bad to discriminate against women, foreigners, and older people in hiring?

No, and it’s fairly ludicrous to even suppose it.

I’m asking why we choose to emphasize this along some axes of characteristics and not along others.

E.g. introvert / extravert axis is something employers are free to discriminate / harass along (e.g. open plan office layouts, less “outgoing” people often paid much less for the same job) even though it likely causes as much damage as any other axis that roughly splits the population. Yet few people seem bothered enough by this to organize legislation or talk about it seriously.

I think it’s interesting to ask why some kinds of characteristcs (gender, sexual orientation) are allowed to have this elevated status, and what does it mean about true intentions behind why there are protected classes of characteristics?

Because of the existence of unprotected characteristic axes like introvert / extravert that few seem to care much about, the explanation of protected classes, by definition, cannot be mitigation of harm / equitable treatment, etc.

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

#134

Post by aVx1uyD5pYWW »

ga-vu wrote: post #48

I see ProPublica is rehashing everyone's articles as their own these days. Didn't Gizmodo prove this and various other abuses a few years back?

ProPublica, and in particular this reporter, has been doing a lot of original research on facebook's abuses in the past few years.

For instance, they started this project to collect facebook ads: https://projects.propublica.org/facebook-ads/

See also this joint investigation by the New York Times and ProPublica: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/business/facebook-job-ads...

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

kortilla wrote: post #122
dragonwriter wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But no one said it is was ethical in the case where it is legal, so if that was the intended question, not only is it phrased wrong but it starts from an unsupported premise, to wit, that people in the discussion believe that one is ethical and the other not.

If someone asks why something is legal, the answer they are looking for is never “because the laws allow it”.

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by WomanCanCode »

When I was younger (unmarried and no kids), I could work 11 hours in the office as a software developer. And that translate to 55 hours a week minimum. But now I just work 9.5 hours a day. I would love to work 8 hours, but based on my experience you really need to work as much as you can get so you can have a “good” daily stand-up report. I wish I could have a better work and life balance … but when you are a software engineer, you can't turn off your programming brain. The problem will be in your mind even if you leave the office, sadly

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

#138

Post by seanmcdirmid »

dragonwriter wrote: post #49
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. 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.

What if the bias was learned by a neural network or other algorithm (eg historical insurance costs, page rank, ...)? Does that somehow make it legal if they make an inference about a protected class and stop advertising to them?

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

#139

Post by gnicholas »

throwawayjava wrote: post #123
gnicholas wrote: post #116

Could these legal arguments be extended to lookalike audiences that are built off of email lists that have a gender imbalance? That is, imagine I go to a university to recruit, and I talk with 200 male students and 10 female students. I then take their email addresses and make a lookalike audience to advertise my jobs to. Could that be challenged on the grounds that I am trying to advertise to male students? What if…

The ad must have discriminatory intent [1]. So if you're selecting candidates with a black box ML model and you didn't explicitly include racial/gender preferences... But "the algorithm was sexist, not me" is probably going to be a losing argument in any court case. [1] Well, not entirely, but that's another can of worms.

Yeah, I was asking what the requisite intent is. Is it The intent to knowingly discriminate, intent to do the thing that is discriminatory (a lesser standard), or merely a disparate impact (which does not require any particular state of mind)?

Edited for clarity

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

#140

Post by kuzimoto »

nicoburns wrote: post #85
300bps wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The UK changed the law fairly recently to prevent price differentiation by gender.

I feel like this is just a good way to make women pay as much as men, instead of lowering prices for men to pay as much as women.
Post reply on HN