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

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

#301

Post by peteretep »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #286
peteretep wrote: post #251

> Not just Facebook, but any targeted advertising platform that can target based on demographic could do this. I'd like to point out that specifically you can NOT do this on Facebook any more, or at least not if Facebook find it out. They make you mark your ads as being job posts, and remove demographic targeting from that. The headline here is irritating, because the headline being shown is two years old. The headli…

> The headline here is irritating A newly-public EEOC ruling resulting from investigative journalism around explicitly discriminatory hiring practices facilitated (and profited from) by one of the more morally-bankrupt technology companies of our time is announced, and your gripe is the journalists aren’t giving Facebook enough credit? A lot of discrimination happened while Facebook hadn’t fixed the problem. Discrimi…

> and your gripe is the journalists aren’t giving Facebook enough credit?

My gripe is that the headline _as it currently is on HN_ is two years out of date, and that the real headline is "Government rules targeting job ads using demographics is illegal".

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

#302

Post by concordDance »

stakhanov wrote: post #290

There are job boards that SPECIFICALLY make it their business to target women and deliver female candidates looking for tech roles (in organizations that are in need of diversity hires): https://powertofly.com/ ...and companies pay a premium for those job advertising channels. Why is it a great business and an initiative to be applauded if it is about excluding men and a scandal if it is about excluding women?

I expect that most of the people applauding women-targetted recruiting are not the same people disliking men-targetted recruiting.

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

#303

Post by AdrianB1 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #276
wesammikhail wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is actually a minimal agreed upon set of goods, espoused in the Universal declaration of human rights (or your country's equivalent). For instance, travel services must be free from discrimination: > Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. Or buying property > Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. Or the issues o…

A declaration is not a law and there are many countries without an equivalent, some don't even have a Bill of Rights equivalent (Australia is one). That declaration is just a political statement, nothing more.

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

#304

Post by m0zg »

flukus wrote: post #265
m0zg wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never got a job in response to an ad either. Have you? Do you personally know anyone who has? Another issue, with workplace politics and edicts being what they are, wouldn't white men be a better category of applicants to exclude via such targeting? I'm pretty sure this is happening as we speak. I don't view this as a problem, though, for the reason alluded to above: approximately nobody in tech lands jobs in re…

Do you mean ads in general or posting to public job listings? Because all my jobs have come from the later and it's been the primary hiring pipeline everywhere I've worked. Can't say I've seen a lot of hiring from general advertising channels but if they're paying for the ads then they're presumably hiring from that channel.

I thought the issue here was with demographically targetable ads on e.g. Google or Facebook. I've been a hiring manager in the past, and we never used those. Most of our entry level employees were from career fairs at the nearby university. Most of our senior employees were either from the network or from (ultra-expensive) recruiters. Frankly it never even occurred to anyone to purchase targeted ads because they're so uncommon.

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

#305

Post by dragonwriter »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #230
dragonwriter wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That kind of thing is why the doctrine of disparate impact was developed. It's really not; disparate impact deals with it, but the doctrine was articulated in a case with ample evidence that the policy at issue, though facially neutral, was adopted as a deliberate replacement for explicit racial discrimination with an intent to maintain it's discriminatory effect and without other business purpose, and the doctrine…

The doctrine was first articulated in a case (Griggs v. Duke Power Co.) where the Supreme Court explicitly held the employer didn't intend to discriminate.

> the Supreme Court explicitly held the employer didn't intend to discriminate.

The Supreme Court did not hold that, it merely noted that the lower courts had held that, and noted that a lack of discriminatory intent was “suggested” by the Company's efforts to help undereducated employees by financing a major portion of remedial education (part, but not all, of the policy held to be disparate impact was adoption of high school diploma requirements for positions for which such requirements has no substantial relation to job performance.)

The Supreme Court explicitly did not consider whether there was intent to discriminate, because it was not necessary to do so to resolve the case.

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

#306

Post by nql »

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…

The doctrine of disparate impact is plainly immoral and flies in the face of freedom of association. Society should punish companies which display behaviors they do not approve of using the market instead of the government.

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

#307

Post by dragonwriter »

nql wrote: post #306
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…

The doctrine of disparate impact is plainly immoral and flies in the face of freedom of association. Society should punish companies which display behaviors they do not approve of using the market instead of the government.

Were we to take the second sentence seriously, we would have to conclude that the general idea of prohibition of discrimination of whatever kind in non-governmental action (whether employment or public accommodation) was immoral, not merely the specific doctrine of disparate impact.

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

#308

Post by m0zg »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #255
m0zg wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be that as it may, if I were a hiring manager today whose bonus and promo opportunities depend on meeting the diversity quota, you can guess how I'd be setting up the targeting on my hiring ad campaign, ethics be damned. That having been said, I fully agree that such targeting in job ads in particular should be illegal. I agree with this out of my own rational self interest, as a straight white male in my 40s. Other…

Well, if you were smart about it you wouldn’t focus on ads at all. Rather you’d figure out how to poach known talent from other companies. Easier still if you were looking for entry levels, hitting the universities directly would work given recent enrollment increases (start them out with good internships during the sophomore or junior years would be much more useful here). I don’t see how an ad would be effective at…

>> hitting the universities directly

That's exactly what we did, with a modicum of success. The pickings are super slim, though. Most CS students don't really seem to give a shit about CS, meaning they don't do anything other than coursework, at all, and their coursework is pretty primitive, and uses Java which our company had no use for.

Another problem is when you go to career fairs, easily 9 out of 10 people coming to your booth will be looking for an internship rather than a job. This isn't a problem per se, if you're a large company this is actually pretty great. But I was hiring for a small (at the time) startup, so that was a bit of a waste of everyone's time. Still we landed a few diamonds in the rough after a few attempts. 8/10, would hire from local schools again.

Ironically, the most extensively qualified candidate I met at these career fairs was female. She was in grad school and had a resume you wouldn't believe if you'd seen it, and very obviously smart as a whip. She was, however, too smart to work for a startup. Can't say I blame her.

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

#309

Post by concordDance »

kjs3 wrote: post #194
DoreenMichele wrote: post #24

I have mixed feelings about this. I am absolutely aware this can be a means to intentionally exclude specific groups due to prejudice and can be a polite way to do terrible things. I get that. But the reality is that the modern world seems to seriously suck at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for themselves or help employers find the right people for the job. I keep thinking "Surely, there m…

The "modern world" sucks at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for one of two reasons: 1) they keep thinking about gender and age as qualifiers for jobs for which those factors have absolutely zero relevance (girls are bad at math! Old people can't learn new things!), or 2) They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job (girls will just get pregnant and leave! oldster…

I can't tell if you are arguing that no job requires learning lots of new things or that old people don't learn any slower than the young...

Are you arguing one of those two things or have I misunderstood?

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

#310

Post by adrianN »

abbasaamer wrote: post #298
adrianN wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for similar reasons like it generally being seen as a good thing to give free food and housing to the poor, but frowned upon to do the same for the rich.

That's a poor comparison and I think most people understand that, even if the current environment discourages them from admitting it.

Why do you think that it's a poor comparison?
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