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Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

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281–290 of 407 posts

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#281

It's interesting that the headline and article seems to be focused on the advertisers targeting ads towards men when there were also instances where the ads were targetted towards only women. Shouldn't those both be equally wrong? And I don't see anything inherently wrong with targeted towards a specific gender so long as that targeted is compensated for elsewhere in your recruiting strategy. Lots of magazines are re…

Well partly it's neater to write the headline and grab attention, but partly it's because their research seems to be indicating that this is being used to target only men. For example:

>Our survey of 91 Uber ads found just one targeting only women; three did not target a specific sex.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#282
post #101

On the fence about this one. Whilst targeting individual groups can certainly lead to inequalities there is the problem of tailoring ads to an audience. One way a company may wish to make their ads more appealing is by showing relatable people in adverts. If a company is running two variations of the same job advert, one featuring women and one featuring men, distributing coverage across the two variations evenly, th…

Yes it would still be a problem. I can’t speak for job postings but I can speak for real estate. There are certain things that you are not allowed to say in advertisement or as a real estate agent.

Even in jobs, you would be walking a very fine line if an obviously pregnant woman walked in and you started mentioning that the place you work is great for mothers.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#283
post #265
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provided that fb is a social network, lying to it must be lying to your environment?

I'm only friends with people on Facebook who know my gender, so it doesn't really matter. Plus it only actually shows in a few places such as "xxx replied to his/her comment" notifications.

Any idea how Facebook handles people with rare gender pronouns? Doesn't Canadian law require use of chosen gender pronouns and Facebook operates in Canada.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#284
post #29

(from another thread very similar to this) I really don't see how the companies placing the ads, aren't going to get hammered for it. But Facebook is doing nothing illegal, unless the ads, were placed for jobs with Facebook. Just as newspaper/radio/tv aren't required not to post job adverts that violate the EEOC's rules. For clarity, According to the EEOC ( https://www1.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm?renderforprin…

Just as newspaper/radio/tv aren't required not to post job adverts that violate the EEOC's rules.

http://panewsmedia.org/legal/legaltopics/legalemployment

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#285

We need to stop treating Facebook or any digital infrastructure as culpable when it's users are the ones responsible. As far as Facebook's concerned, it's an advertiser picking a demographic. I bet they don't know what the ad is about! What next? Hold AT&T culpable for providing internet to these advertisers?

Facebook is not culpable for what it’s users post. They are just as culpable when they accept money from advertisers as any newspaper would be.

Apple for instance would be sued into oblivion if it let anyone post a song for sale on iTunes without any vetting for copyrighted content.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#287
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not really how digital advertising targeting works though. In fact, they go to great lengths to make sure you illegally exclude by a class Facebook absolutely has an option to show your advert to a specific gender, though > Gender. Target ads to women, men or people of all genders. https://www.facebook.com/business/help/717368264947302?helpr... So what's happening after that point to stop you from restrictin…

I'm trying to explain that gender targeting is imprecise. When I say the hit rate of ads targeting women is 50%, I mean that of the number of people who see ads that were targeted at women, only 50% of them were women. Targeting men works a little bit more consistently, by usually about 10%, but I don't know why. That's industry-wide. I don't know if Facebook does better or not, but I have no reason to think so. Even…

I'd expect Facebook to be better because they ask what your gender is and many people will have explicitly told them.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#288

Did they look at the reverse as well, or would that not be shocking enough? I'd be surprised if there were no companies targeting only women for tampons, various beauty products, breast health.

Legally speaking, job ads are not the same as those for consumer products or services.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#289
post #203
post #7

I'm a bit mixed about this; it is clearly discriminatory to publish a job ad that says "women need not apply", but it doesn't feel inherently discriminatory to advertise a job in, say, "Men's Health" but not "Cosmopolitan" magazine. Or to advertise on a particular television channel or program (whose viewers may not match the population at large). That's just how advertising works. Is that crazy? Would this be differ…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact One thing you might be interested in reading about is Disparate Impact. Discrimination cases can be proven by showing that a practice has a disproportionately adverse impact on members of a protected class, even in the absence of intentional discrimination. The Supreme Court noted in Griggs v. Duke Power Co that the Civil Rights Act bans "not only overt discrimination bu…

Facebook ad campaigns heavily favor advertisers slicing up demographics as much as possible. I am going to make the assumption that at the very beginning of the campaign an advertiser created many segments, split by age and gender. After they do that, certain segments are going to respond better and the distribution for those ads is going to increase while the others fall. The alternative is that the advertiser is going to have to jack up the bidding for the non-responsive demographics.

(And for anyone who doesn't know much about digital advertising, despite all of the crazy complexities, all of these systems are basically trying to maximize displays toward people who are going to respond to the ad and eliminate displays to people who won't. The definition of a response at the simplest is a click, but at the most complex is a lead, app install, purchase over a certain order size, etc. In many cases even the deepest pocketed brand advertisers will not be able to out-bid a highly optimized ad campaign for specific inventory.)

On the other side of the internet advertising pie you have Google (excluding Indeed and LinkedIn because I know only a little about their platforms.) An advertiser is going to bid on "driver jobs" or whatever, and Google is going to do the rest. Way back when, before Google collected user demographics, the ad is going to show just for the people who searched it. I'm going to take a guess that some job keywords split 50/50 while others skew heavily toward certain genders or age groups (e.g. 0 females over 65 are searching for manual labor jobs.) With Google's demographic data and machine learning based targeting, what is really going on today, in 2018, is a mystery to me. I would assume that these algorithms are not demographically neutral. They probably learn that males respond more to driving ads. Almost certainly on the display side of things (which Google's less sophisticated ad buyers might not realize they are purchasing) the ads are going to start skewing toward certain demographics.

Solely based on the way Facebook's platform works, I would question if it is ok for any advertiser to place ads on Facebook's platform as Facebook can place the blame on the advertiser even though it is ultimately a consequence of how their system is designed. On Google's side, the same discrimination is likely happening but the advertiser can probably blame Google.

At the end of the day, larger questions persist. How much money should employers be spending on letting employees know that they have a paying job available to them? And, is it ok that job opportunities, which may be superior, and being buried by those that have deeper pocketed employers?

Because of Google's semi-recent launch and expansion of Google Jobs results, which almost certainly will end up heavily monetized, I think these are very important questions.

Re: Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men

#290
post #86

I see a bunch of claims, but is this actually illegal in the US? More specifically, is it illegal to selectively advertise a job provided that the business doesn't profile during actual hiring? If I post job listings in upper-class white neighborhoods only, would that be illegal? What if I had one ad that targeted men and another which targeted women? What if the male version was designed to be successful while the f…

Unfortunately yes, the descrimination law in the US is ridiculous and complicated.
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