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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

#431

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

soulofmischief wrote: post #239
Spooky23 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you target against protected classes, yes. Facebook has a history of facilitating this type of thing and crying ignorance later. A local landlord was caught using Facebook to target apartment listings to people who weren’t black, Hispanic, Jewish, or gay.

As a white male, I'd like to get in on that protected class bit. No one should be seeing targeted ads if they don't want to, regardless of birth status.

You're in! Race, color, and sex are all federally protected classes[1]. So for things like employment or housing ads it's illegal to exclude (or include) you based on being white or a male.

[1] https://content.next.westlaw.com/Document/Ibb0a38daef0511e28...

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

#432

Post by cryptozeus »

unionpivo wrote: post #334
cryptozeus wrote: post #313

All this will do is force companies which are not open to hiring older people and women will have to spend money interviewing them. They will still reject them and waste everyone’s time.

So the solution is to what, just look away and shrug ? It's a process, you move goal posts one tiny step at a time and eventually it will become less and less acceptable.

Yes fair point, I was going to say biased people will not hire anyway but you have a point. This way you are leveling the playing field.

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

#433

Post by yardie »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #295
taneq wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At which point virtually any targeting criterion is, to some degree, a proxy for criterion targeting a protected class, and targeting at all becomes impossible. Even by advertising on Facebook in the first place, you could argue they're discriminating against people who don't use Facebook. I'm sure you could find a protected demographic with lower-than-average Facebook usage to support this.

Going one step forward, you can say that any company that advertises on any channel and not on all other possible channels (TV, outdoor, print) is discriminating. If you can prove a gender is watching more TV than the other, then it is gender discrimination. This entire discrimination thing is crazy. Yes, a company can discriminate intentionally and not accepting or failing certain candidates based on demographics OR…

First, your argument is completely silly to the point of not being taken seriously.

Now, no one gives a shit about how advertising tampons to women discriminates against men. And no one gives a shit that Axe body spray is targeted to males of a certain demographic. What the government is concerned about is how advertising jobs, housing, and finance can be discriminatory.

If you post an ad for a job that targets exclusively men, you are in violation of the Civil Rights Act (Title IX), and the American Disabilities Act.

If you post an ad for an apartment that targets white males you are in violation of the Housing and Community Development Act and the Civil Rights Act.

If you post an ad for mortgages or other financial vehicles that targets a certain demographic and even certain neighborhoods you are in violation of the Civil Rights Act, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

There is no law against marketing bras to women, beers to men, or Cialis to the elderly. Housing, employment, and access to credit are some of the foundational services that the government has deemed any discrimination is bad. There is no one step forward because there is a clear line drawn in the sand that anyone with a basic understanding of these laws will know.

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

#434

Post by DoreenMichele »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #373
kjs3 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job (girls will just get pregnant and leave! This is not a delusion, and it's a thing commonly talked about in my country (Poland). It's not just about that girls will get pregnant and leave - it'll be that girls will get pregnant and out of the sudden[0] go on paid maternity leave, which they can extend to a year, during which you have to keep the…

This is actually a hard problem to genuinely solve. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm not really happy with the current way we typically talk about such things, which often amounts to denying that such issues exist.

You can't solve problems while pretending they don't exist and making it Verboten to speak of them.

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

#435

Post by hutzlibu »

stakhanov wrote: post #395
dTal wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sexist -> awkward -> long hair is quite a series of leaps, and I'm mighty curious as to the underlying mental model. You appear to be implying that women might not want to go into IT because the men are unattractive. But unattractive is not the same as hostile. If you enjoy something, ugly people won't keep you away. Of note is that the percentage of open source programmers who are women is half that of the broader i…

...I agree. I find it disturbing, how quick women are to bring up notions like "awkward" and "creepy" in discussions such as this. 80% of "awkward" is about social interactions unfolding in a way that are outside the norm. 80% of "creepy" is about being unattractive. Not being socialized to conform with the norms is mostly a function of your childhood upbringing. Not being attractive is a function of your genes. Both…

"Not being attractive is a function of your genes"

No. Genes play a role, but attractiveness is not so much about looks as it is about confidence and self esteem (and smell, of course).

I was considered very ugly in my youth. And yes, I compensated with computers. I did not got much experience with girls in teenage years.

Then I traveled, studied and grew in my mind and confidence.

And today, well, lets just say, sometimes I am still confused, when very attractive women flirt with me, as my old me would have considered them to be way out of league.

Now I know how to play the game, so to say, but in the beginning, I know I hurt quite some feelings and was probably considered arrogant, when I simply did not know how to respond.

So, I got out of the basement. But:

"I don't see at all how an environment full of unattractive and not well-socialized people create an environment that is in any way hostile to women."

many nerds never did. They long for women, but never learned the game and sometimes think, they are too ugly etc. bullshit.

So when you have lots of men with unfullfiled desires and weak confidence or knowledge regarding women ... then yes, they act awkward towards women. They would like to bond, but don't knowmhow and think they never can. So not hostile, but awkward, so quite some women feel uncomfortable and rather leave.

Now to be clear, no, not every IT nerd is like this. But too many. I was one of them once.

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

#436

Post by amanaplanacanal »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #367
repolfx wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many firms don't offer maternity leave? Outside of tiny 5 person startups that don't have any HR policies at all that seems like a strawman. As for men making condescending comments towards women, that's not a systematic problem with a systematic solution. And women (or really, feminists) pretty routinely make condescending comments towards men in my experience, at a much, much greater rate. The idea that women f…

I think what the warring feminist faction doesn't understand (or does and ignores) is that their actions are breeding fear and resentment towards women. There's a spectrum here, On the consequence-less wrong end you have assholes getting away with sexist comments toward their women colleagues[0]. In the desirable middle, you have everyone treating everyone else with proper professional respect. But on the other bad e…

I wonder how widespread this really is, though. Before I retired I worked in IT, an my particular team was about 50-50 men and women. I certainly didn't feel anything like

> every male in the office becoming tense and extremely self-conscious in presence of their women co-workers, because of the perceived risk that they may be dealing with someone that gets easily offended about random things and is ready to create a stink with HR

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

#437

Post by Eucatastrophe »

In California, you can never discriminate against gender or age. Targeting demographic or certain homes for sale of goods is different than targeting individuals for being who they are, i.e. man or woman of a certain age and denying employment based on those factors alone.

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

#438

Post by username90 »

Angostura wrote: post #423
pdub123 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, it's actually natural. Presenting it as bad is simply, at worst: propaganda espoused by sheep and their shepherds, and at best: ignornace. There has been a ton of research done on "Thing vs People" career interests, which show very clearly that men prefer working with Things, whereas Women prefer working with People. (When I say prefer, I mean the average in a normal distribution) Simply google: occupationa…

Exactly what proportion of the gender imbalance is accounted for by a "Thing vs People" disparity, according to those studies? Is it only a question of sex-related disposition? If so, what has caused disposition to change so radically over the last 30 years? And why, for example where over 50% of nurses men in the 1900s in the US, but it is now only around 7%? What caused men to apparently become so much less interes…

Historically most nurses were related to war, men fight war and thus become nurses. Even in the modern military you learn how to apply bandages, identify different kinds of wounds and how to treat them etc to keep your mates alive even in the modern military, so you could call everyone in the army a "nurse". But of course they are not modern nurses, the profession changed over time from mostly patching up people after fights to mostly treating diseases as our understanding of diseases improved.

The same thing with programming, women were dominant when it was mostly low level computations, but more and more men joined the field as computers grew more powerful and people saw the breadth of programs you could create. So the job changed, early it was more about maths and algorithms, and then we added more and more engineering tasks on top and people started to create huge programs which doesn't resemble math at all. So the gender balance of programmers shifted from the relatively equal applied math field to the extremely male dominated field of engineering. You can look it up, STEM without E has a very balanced gender ratio, while E tend to have above 80% men.

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

#439

Post by username90 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #330
stakhanov wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I object to the use of "dominated". In a herd, a "dominant" animal will actively work to keep others away from food sources and mating opportunities when those are scarce. This is not what this is. Strictly my opinion: There are few women in software engineering because few women WANT to be in software engineering, period. ...and it's not a given that this is by definition a bad thing for them either.

Maybe one of the reasons women do not want to work in IT is, that the atmosphere is still sometimes sexist? Or at least arkward. When I started to study IT, I was surprised to see, that the stereotypes were the majority. Meaning, long, oily hair, etc. So I guess that is still changing, and I really do not believe 50% women should be the goal, but maybe the IT world still needs reflection sometimes, why so little wome…

> Or at least arkward. When I started to study IT, I was surprised to see, that the stereotypes were the majority. Meaning, long, oily hair, etc.

I see what you mean, the real discrimination in tech is against well groomed people! So all the well groomed men and women get pushed out and are forced to study things like business, medicine or law instead!

How do we solve that? I know, we put up posters like "Deodorant is not a sin", have mandatory diversity training days teaching the nerds how to properly shave, and have recruiters float well groomed peoples applications to the top!

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

#440

Post by [deleted] »

username90 wrote: post #438
Angostura wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what proportion of the gender imbalance is accounted for by a "Thing vs People" disparity, according to those studies? Is it only a question of sex-related disposition? If so, what has caused disposition to change so radically over the last 30 years? And why, for example where over 50% of nurses men in the 1900s in the US, but it is now only around 7%? What caused men to apparently become so much less interes…

Historically most nurses were related to war, men fight war and thus become nurses. Even in the modern military you learn how to apply bandages, identify different kinds of wounds and how to treat them etc to keep your mates alive even in the modern military, so you could call everyone in the army a "nurse". But of course they are not modern nurses, the profession changed over time from mostly patching up people afte…

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