15 ms·

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

by patmcc 8y ago

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 different if, for example, Facebook was targeting people for job ads based on "people who like action movies" or "people who like romance novels" (I'm stereotyping here, but just assume you pick a category that ends up being a decent proxy for gender)?

meowface 8y ago
Yes, it would be very different. For example, the two things you listed are probably rather bad proxies for gender (even if it's only hypothetical). All they had to do was pick the niche they're going for (which may incidentally turn out to be highly skewed to one gender) rather than making it 100% one gender. I honestly don't even understand the purpose of advertising anything to only men or only women. (The obvious answer would be "sexism", but presumably the advertiser is making some assumption of economic benefit for only targeting one or the other.)
- gascan 8y ago
  I honestly don't even understand the purpose of advertising anything to only men or only women. If you pay per view, it's entirely rational to target towards the demographic that produces the most spend for your ad budget. Why would you waste money advertising, e.g., mascara or sanitary pads to men? Sure, there's probably some infinitesimal fraction of men who would be interested, but targeting them profitably is not a trivial exercise.
  - meowface 8y ago
    In classic rubber duck-debugging style, I ended up realizing that as soon as I pressed submit. In that case I suppose it's not very ethically questionable for things that are very clearly 100% (within a minuscule margin of error) men's only (prostate health, etc.) or women's only (sanitary pads). I guess the real quandary is for stuff that's male-dominated like hard, dangerous physical labor (coal mining etc.), but not 100% men. If a recruiter can statistically prove that the most efficient use of their advertising dollars to hire for a coal mining job is by targeting only men, 1) is it sexist and/or unethical, and 2) should it be legal?
    - mcny 8y ago
      > a recruiter can statistically prove that the most efficient use of their advertising dollars to hire for a coal mining job is by targeting only men, 1) is it sexist and/or unethical, and 2) should it be legal? I put this at the same level as only hiring women to teach elementary school. Yes, it is sexist and uneducated. No, it shouldn't be legal.
      - WillPostForFood 8y ago
        What if you spend the same amount of money but create separate ads targeted at men and women? What if you are trying to get more female engineers at your company, and want to target women?
        briandear 8y ago
        Isn’t it discriminatory to have an intent to discriminate based on gender? “We want more <gender> at our company.” Unless gender is a bonafide qualification, that should be illegal just as “we want to hire more white people.”
        WillPostForFood 8y ago
        Right, but let's go with the premise that you have an imbalance, and are trying to bring into balance. Then a gender or race targeted ad seems like a reasonable approach. I guess my point is an targeted ad isn't evidence of intent to discriminate, and in fact can be a key component of pro-diversity actions.
      - meowface 8y ago
        I think there's a difference between "hiring only men/women" and "advertising to only men/women". A company could launch a recruitment campaign which is only visible to one gender, but still not discriminate against applicants from the opposite gender. Presumably they have many more ways to list job openings than targeted Facebook ads, so they're not specifically excluding one gender from that job; just from the ad.
  - jamescostian 8y ago
    Why would you waste money advertising to women who don't want mascara or don't need pads? I would think you'd be better of targetting people who bought some sort of eye makeup if you wanted to sell mascara, and target people who bought pads or tampons if you were selling pads.
    - gascan 8y ago
      I'm not an ad man, but you have imperfect data about your customers, and I gather it's all about trying to predict what they might buy based on very imperfect/incomplete information about them. Plus, your ability to apply more advanced heuristics is constrained by your ability to develop them, both from a technical & marketing standpoint. "User is a woman" would, in this hypothetical example, be one factor in your larger weighting algorithm. A weighting factor that is, might I add, quite easy to implement compared to detecting male performing arts majors with a specialty in costume design.
    - IanCal 8y ago
      > Why would you waste money advertising to women who don't want mascara or don't need pads? Because you don't know in advance. It's entirely why advertisers offer so many different bits of information on you, to optimise this. > I would think you'd be better of targetting people who bought some sort of eye makeup if you wanted to sell mascara, and target people who bought pads or tampons if you were selling pads. And people do this, if they have this information. Of course, there's also the side that you don't want to advertise to someone you strongly expect to buy, because it's the conversions from no-sale to sale you care about.
- oh-kumudo 8y ago
  Well, there are many gender specific products there, for example female hygiene products. Doesn't mean the opposite sex will straightly not buy them (Yes, they do, https://mashable.com/2018/01/28/amazon-go-tampons-pads-tech-video/ https://mashable.com/2018/01/28/amazon-go-tampons-pads-tech-...), but it is safe to assume that they are probably not interested (Look at the previous link and there is actually an outrage because of it.).
- abnry 8y ago
  It is unlikely only and all men. They probably don't target men without college degrees. They way they probably get where they did was by successively narrowing down by selecting more attributes.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  The usual scenario is that you make a bunch of variants of an ad, do some testing and find out that option A works a bit better on women, option C works a bit better on men, and option B sucks; so then you'd run ad A targeting only women, and ad C targeting only men. You don't want to show ad C to any women since you have reasons to believe that showing ad A would be more effective for the same price.
carbocation 8y ago
As a legal layperson, to me it seems that the argument would focus around this topic: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/#application_and_hiring https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/#application_and_hiring Basically, I think the better lens is one that looks at discriminatory hiring practices, rather than one that looks at advertisements to a selected demographic.
Paul_Dessert 8y ago
Exactly. This doesn't necessarily mean these companies advertised the job to one gender. It simply means the ad was targeted at a specific gender. For all we know, the companies spent twice as much on a different ad set for women.
- arnjerobben 8y ago
  Why would they do that?
  - edanm 8y ago
    Theoretically? For the same reason many companies have different advertisements that target different populations - because different advertisements play to different needs/desires, so you can engage with people in the most efficient way in terms of conversion.
bobthepanda 8y ago
No one is excluded though. A woman can buy Men's Health; a man can buy Cosmopolitan. What Facebook is doing is enabling straight up exclusion of genders from advertising, which is completely different in the eyes of the law.
- maccio92 8y ago
  So Victoria's secret should be forced to advertise to men too?
  - jwassil 8y ago
    Pretty sure it does already :)
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    No? How does that follow?
  - wtvanhest 8y ago
    You can segment product advertising, but not housing or jobs or any other categories where there are 'protected classes' (US)
    - notyourday 8y ago
      I cannot wait until some enterprising man decides to apply to be a VS angel. It would be so glorious.
  - Angostura 8y ago
    I imagine they make up a fair proportion of the customer base.
  - chrisoverzero 8y ago
    Men buy lingerie.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    Man, what an unimaginable dystopia, where VS’s hand were forced to the point where they made ads that played on men’s desires and were visually appealing to them ... /s If you mean, “what if they had to make ads that promoted men wearing their products”, I get your point, but I thought it was a funny ambiguity.
gascan 8y ago
While I see both sides of the argument, as long as the advertiser pays per view, it seems wrong to require the listing to target demographics that are almost certainly uninterested. Your example of listing a job in Men's Health but not Cosmopolitan seems good. Technically not a perfect analogue as a woman always could buy Men's Health, but in practice very similar. Spinning off into a different angle, what if an advertiser gets the most qualified female applicants advertising through LinkedIn, and the most qualified male applicants through Facebook? (Again assuming pay per view) Is it wrong for them to target women & men on separate platforms with separate ads? Utterly hypothetical of course. Or yet a different angle, what if they have ad "A" and ad "B", each subtly designed to excite one of the sexes. Perhaps an ad for the Marines, one emphasizing toughness & grit, the other emphasizing teamwork & "stronger together". Target one at men, one at women. Legal? To me it seems to come down to the overall behavior of the employer, not Facebook or any one ad.
- detaro 8y ago
  It seems wrong to allow companies to escape legal rules by choosing to advertise in ways that have badly-fitting payment model. The multiple ads question is interesting though, and might very well be a valid defense, since they then are advertising to both.
  - gascan 8y ago
    Yes, I was thinking about that as I wrote, one imperfect but possible fix would be "no pay per view for job listings". Which, for all I know, could already be the case.
    - twblalock 8y ago
      The ads would still be illegal even if they weren't pay per view.
      - gascan 8y ago
        If they aren't pay per view, there's much less incentive to show them to only certain users, and much less burden on the employer to be inclusive.
nateberkopec 8y ago
> Would this be different if, for example, Facebook was targeting people for job ads based on "people who like action movies" or "people who like romance novels" (I'm stereotyping here, but just assume you pick a category that ends up being a decent proxy for gender)? No, this would still be illegal (in the US, anyway). The only difference is that Facebook wouldn't be aiding/abetting an illegal hiring practice. Employers can and have been penalized for hiring from homogenous applicant pools.
- j16sdiz 8y ago
  How about posting a job ad, disgusted as some other product ad? Should Facebook review each and every ad manually? This would put an end to self-service ad posting.
mreome 8y ago
Under the law it would different, none of your examples are protected classes, discrimination in employment is only illegal if the targeted/excluded group is a protected class, those being: men and women on the basis of sex; any group which shares a common race, religion, color, or national origin; people over 40; and people with physical or mental handicaps. The company I work for, for example, does not hire smokers (and makes this clear during hiring and makes the specifics part of our contracts), and this is perfectly legal. But it would be illegal to not hire anyone based on being in, or not being in, one of those specific protected classes. Now, if they were being used as proxies for those classes, then yes it would be illegal, but it would be up to a court to determine if that was the case. If I ran a company that made action movies "Must love action movies" being a basis for my hiring decisions is obviously not intended as a proxy for a protected class and would be legal. If my company makes printer paper, then I'm on shaky legal ground. That being said, I'm not sure if there are actually laws making it illegal to publish discriminatory job ads for someone, but Facebook assisting in illegal and discriminatory actions is an issue regardless of if their part is specifically illegal or not.
telaport 8y ago
You're telling me, if I run a clinic or rehab facility where women with trauma are more comfortable with other female therapists, I'm somehow required to advertise to and interview both men and women for a job - even when I'm only short on demand for a female therapist from a specific demographic or with certain qualifications? The same would go for a shortage of male employees based on patient or clientele requests and demands. I'm not saying Uber has a reason to do this. They may or may not, but to say this feature or ability is illegal is just idiotic. In fact, it's rather useful and worth paying for in my opinion.
- evil-olive 8y ago
  > If I run a clinic or rehab facility where women with trauma are more comfortable with other female therapists, I'm somehow required to advertise to and interview both men and women for a job No, you're not. This is a well-established area of the law, called a bona fide occupational qualification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi... > One example of bona fide occupational qualifications are mandatory retirement ages for bus drivers and airline pilots, for safety reasons. Further, in advertising, a manufacturer of men's clothing may lawfully advertise for male models. Religious belief may also be considered a BFOQ; for example, a religious school may lawfully require that members of its faculty be members of that denomination, and may lawfully bar from employment anyone who is not a member. Fire departments can require firemen to be able to lift a given weight to demonstrate that they will be able to carry fire victims out of a burning building.
Double_a_92 8y ago
What if they would advertise in a tech journal? Most readers are still probably male... But the journal is related to the job. Would that be discriminatory?
- Endy 8y ago
  No, because the point is that "most readers" are male. The advertisement should be unisex. If a woman picks up that journal - whether just looking for want ads or because they are legitimately interested in the topic - they should be considered with complete equity to any male candidate. The point isn't where you advertise, it's if you target. You can target by geography. You can target by education. You can't target by sex.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    You say equity, what innate advantage are you suggesting compensating for? Who needs extra help in this situation?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dogma1138 8y ago
I don’t know about the US but there are rules in regards to job postings in the UK and likely the EU at large that would make that a violation of anti-discrimination laws.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure I've seen adverts asking for women (but not the contrary); can you cite the legislation (at UK level is fine). rant incoming: Indeed in my small niche the almost exclusively female company owners, who always address group messages to "ladies", when enquiring about taking on employees always say "I'm thinking of taking on a girl, where should I advertise" or similar. Weekend help is "a Saturday girl". Ageism and sexism, completely unchallenged by all the feminists who are supposedly keen to see equality. Anyway .. carry on.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    It's allowed for some select cases when there is sufficient justification mainly in arts, education and entertainment.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    In which niche are you working in?
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      It's a specific part of art/education/craft; not going to drill director further than that, sorry.
  - glenndebacker 8y ago
    I can't speak for the UK but in Belgium it's certainly illegal to discriminate based on gender, age, race, .... There was even a case recently where a man won a lawsuit because he was excluded by a clothing store that was searching for a female employee for doing an inventory job. "Brussels, 23 August 2018 - The legal action taken by the Institute for Equality of Women and Men reminds employers that sex is not a criterion for refusing an application. The Leuven Labor Court has sentenced a clothing store to discrimination based on sex. He refused a man's candidacy because he wanted to hire a woman." https://presscenter.org/nl/pressrelease/20180822/een-sollicitant-weigeren-op-basis-van-geslacht-is-discriminatie https://presscenter.org/nl/pressrelease/20180822/een-sollici... (dutch) https://presscenter.org/nl/pressrelease/20180822/een-sollicitant-weigeren-op-basis-van-geslacht-is-discriminatie?lang=fr https://presscenter.org/nl/pressrelease/20180822/een-sollici... (french) That being said I also seen adverts asking for women but technically it's against the law and even with all those laws discriminations happen more often than not.
kazagistar 8y ago
Context matters. The question is one of harm... is it perpetuating or expanding an existing injustice or privilege, and to what extent? People who dislike action movies aren't the subject of any severe underrepresentation in a job market, so it's clearly not as big of a problem.
- Muanh 8y ago
  Do you have any data to back up this claim?
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
What if the ads were targeted at "people with an interest in driving"? I'm fairly sure the percentage of men that fall under that category is higher than women. I mean there's a bunch of car magazines that are gender neutral (that is, they avoid juvenile jokes or cat suit models), if there's an Uber ad in there it'd still mostly be men that read it.
fpoling 8y ago
Men’s health and FB operates at very different scales. FB ads can influence at the global scale and their discriminatory nature can bring potentially much more harm.
mdasen 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact 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 but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation." In fact, "absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures" that operate in a discriminatory manner. Unintentional discrimination is still discrimination. In a piece on age-based discrimination, Facebook said, "age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work." (https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-ads-age-discrimination-targeting https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-ads-age-discrimi...). I think a lot of the industry has been casual about job ads, but Facebook is kinda the first platform that really lets you be exact with a lot of your targeting. Before, maybe you feign ignorance that "Men's Health" doesn't have a lot of women readers. Plus, women can read Men's Health. However, I can't get Facebook ads targeted to a different gender. Facebook lets you be reasonably exacting. If I create a Facebook ad for a job application with no other promotion of the opening (including on my company's website) and target it just to men, is that discriminatory? IANAL, but in Griggs the court held that procedures that act as built-in headwinds for protected groups are illegal. Making it so that women could only hear about the job from a man seems like quite a headwind working against their likelihood of getting the job. Griggs is about job qualifications that were used as a proxy to keep black workers from getting jobs, but making it so that a group of potential workers can't even see the job application seems similar. Going back to your example: if someone used a gender proxy like "people who like action movies", I think it would be hard to defend in court. 1) They don't need to prove discriminatory intent, just disparate impact. 2) It seems likely that a company adopting such targeting would have communication indicating their discriminatory intent. "Facebook won't let us target by gender anymore! What can we do?" "Let's use things like action movies to get the same result!" If that comes out in discovery, it would seem like a simple case. 3) At some point, a court is going to want to know what the basis of that targeting was and it's going to sound really hollow. But it doesn't even matter if they come up with a good cover story, because even if it was unintentional, it can still fall afoul of the law. On the other hand, if I run a tech company and wanted to target "people you are into the Python programming language", that's a group that will likely skew male, but it kinda passes a sniff-test. It just doesn't smell funny. "Yeah, um, we want programmers and I thought targeting people into Python was reasonable." That does sound reasonable. It's not meant as a proxy for gender, but for an interest/skill that is closely related to the job. Action movies aren't related to my job, but a programming language is. Going back to the magazines: I think much of the same might apply, but I'm guessing that we've been relatively lax about it as a society. It might not feel inherently discriminatory, but disparate impact doesn't rely on intentional discrimination. You say, "that's just how advertising works," but you could easily place ads in multiple places to reach a wide variety of people. One program might not reflect the population at large, but I don't think it's rocket science to advertise in multiple places to reach a more representative sample. As I noted above, Facebook says that job targeting (at least on age) is an accepted industry practice. There are people that don't like the disparate impact theory (though it is established Supreme Court precedent since 1971). Plus, I don't know if disparate impact has ever been used in terms of narrowing the field before applications even come in. In Griggs, the procedure disproprotionately weeded out black applicants. In the Facebook case, those potential applicants never even knew the job existed. I have definitely thought the same things you've thought. Society is hard. Fairness is hard. But I think it's important that we work toward fairness. This isn't meant to be anti-company. I just think companies should have a bit of a justification for doing something if it runs contrary to fairness. If you're only advertising your programming jobs to people under 40, why? If the answer is, "we mostly don't want to hire older programmers, but if a good one happens to come along we'll take them", that doesn't feel like a great justification. In fact, it basically admits discrimination. If the answer is, "there are more young programmers than old programmers", I think the retort has to be, "given the loads of ways you can target, why not target based on interests rather than age or gender? Targeting to people interested in CS, various programming languages, etc. seems both better for you and for potential applicants...unless you're trying to discriminate." It's not always simple, straight-forward, or easy, but I think we're trying to build a better, more fair society and that requires hard-work and questioning.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
>>but it doesn't feel inherently discriminatory to advertise a job in, say, "Men's Health" but not "Cosmopolitan" magazine. Similar but still very different argument. A woman can pick up Men's Health but FB ads just don't show up in her stream. Also Uber specifically and purposefully left women out, unless they say, "oh, we clicked the checkbox by mistake" ("or didn't click the women one..." )
wruza 8y ago
Anyone can buy Cosmopolitan and read ads, but no one can pretend for being someone other on fb/etc. If zuck and alphabet provided options to tune your profile card and live the other live for a while, an argument would be over and ads would not suffer. Default settings rule the world anyway. People could also escape few echo chambers as a side effect.
bluto 8y ago
Re the FB example and action movies. Action movies are not a protected Federal class as are age, race, sex, religion, and national origin.
johnchristopher 8y ago
> That's just how advertising works. Is that crazy? Why should advertising be considered the default or the correct method ? People still need jobs to feed themselves and their loved ones. It's about their survival and oppression and discrimination is still a thing. Would there be a debate if ethnic was used instead of gender ?
anthony_romeo 8y ago
Let's say that a man has a subscription to The New York Times, but the NYT chooses to print a Men's version that has some job postings and a Women's version that has other job postings without telling you. What if the man is a cosmetologist and isn't seeing any cosmetology job postings because they're all in the Women's edition? The issue with targeting by sex is that it presupposes interest in certain areas, and while a person's interests can change, a person's sex can't [without significant medical intervention].
will_brown 8y ago
>I'm a bit mixed about this; it is clearly discriminatory to publish a job ad that says "women need not apply", In general that is discrimination, but as with all things in law the general rule only exists for exceptions. One exception is a “Bonafide occupational qualification”...some famous cases involve men playboy, hooters, and Abercrombie and Fitch (though A&F was a case of discrimition against blacks, which A&F attempted to defend by arguing being white was a bonafide occupation qualification because it fit their overall marketing and target demographic).
throw2016 8y ago
This is not lifestyle advertising. Tenders, job ads and other categories that require equal access and transparency have rules to prevent exactly this kind of discrimination and skullduggery. Facebook had made an error here, as has Uber and this is a pretty straightforward violation.
tapatio 8y ago
Yes. "People who like action movies" and "people who like romance novels" are not protected classes.

by patmcc 8y ago

meowface 8y ago

Yes, it would be very different. For example, the two things you listed are probably rather bad proxies for gender (even if it's only hypothetical). All they had to do was pick the niche they're going for (which may incidentally turn out to be highly skewed to one gender) rather than making it 100% one gender. I honestly don't even understand the purpose of advertising anything to only men or only women. (The obvious answer would be "sexism", but presumably the advertiser is making some assumption of economic benefit for only targeting one or the other.)

gascan 8y ago
I honestly don't even understand the purpose of advertising anything to only men or only women. If you pay per view, it's entirely rational to target towards the demographic that produces the most spend for your ad budget. Why would you waste money advertising, e.g., mascara or sanitary pads to men? Sure, there's probably some infinitesimal fraction of men who would be interested, but targeting them profitably is not a trivial exercise.
- meowface 8y ago
  In classic rubber duck-debugging style, I ended up realizing that as soon as I pressed submit. In that case I suppose it's not very ethically questionable for things that are very clearly 100% (within a minuscule margin of error) men's only (prostate health, etc.) or women's only (sanitary pads). I guess the real quandary is for stuff that's male-dominated like hard, dangerous physical labor (coal mining etc.), but not 100% men. If a recruiter can statistically prove that the most efficient use of their advertising dollars to hire for a coal mining job is by targeting only men, 1) is it sexist and/or unethical, and 2) should it be legal?
  - mcny 8y ago
    > a recruiter can statistically prove that the most efficient use of their advertising dollars to hire for a coal mining job is by targeting only men, 1) is it sexist and/or unethical, and 2) should it be legal? I put this at the same level as only hiring women to teach elementary school. Yes, it is sexist and uneducated. No, it shouldn't be legal.
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      What if you spend the same amount of money but create separate ads targeted at men and women? What if you are trying to get more female engineers at your company, and want to target women?
      - briandear 8y ago
        Isn’t it discriminatory to have an intent to discriminate based on gender? “We want more <gender> at our company.” Unless gender is a bonafide qualification, that should be illegal just as “we want to hire more white people.”
        WillPostForFood 8y ago
        Right, but let's go with the premise that you have an imbalance, and are trying to bring into balance. Then a gender or race targeted ad seems like a reasonable approach. I guess my point is an targeted ad isn't evidence of intent to discriminate, and in fact can be a key component of pro-diversity actions.
    - meowface 8y ago
      I think there's a difference between "hiring only men/women" and "advertising to only men/women". A company could launch a recruitment campaign which is only visible to one gender, but still not discriminate against applicants from the opposite gender. Presumably they have many more ways to list job openings than targeted Facebook ads, so they're not specifically excluding one gender from that job; just from the ad.
- jamescostian 8y ago
  Why would you waste money advertising to women who don't want mascara or don't need pads? I would think you'd be better of targetting people who bought some sort of eye makeup if you wanted to sell mascara, and target people who bought pads or tampons if you were selling pads.
  - gascan 8y ago
    I'm not an ad man, but you have imperfect data about your customers, and I gather it's all about trying to predict what they might buy based on very imperfect/incomplete information about them. Plus, your ability to apply more advanced heuristics is constrained by your ability to develop them, both from a technical & marketing standpoint. "User is a woman" would, in this hypothetical example, be one factor in your larger weighting algorithm. A weighting factor that is, might I add, quite easy to implement compared to detecting male performing arts majors with a specialty in costume design.
  - IanCal 8y ago
    > Why would you waste money advertising to women who don't want mascara or don't need pads? Because you don't know in advance. It's entirely why advertisers offer so many different bits of information on you, to optimise this. > I would think you'd be better of targetting people who bought some sort of eye makeup if you wanted to sell mascara, and target people who bought pads or tampons if you were selling pads. And people do this, if they have this information. Of course, there's also the side that you don't want to advertise to someone you strongly expect to buy, because it's the conversions from no-sale to sale you care about.
oh-kumudo 8y ago
Well, there are many gender specific products there, for example female hygiene products. Doesn't mean the opposite sex will straightly not buy them (Yes, they do, https://mashable.com/2018/01/28/amazon-go-tampons-pads-tech-video/ https://mashable.com/2018/01/28/amazon-go-tampons-pads-tech-...), but it is safe to assume that they are probably not interested (Look at the previous link and there is actually an outrage because of it.).
abnry 8y ago
It is unlikely only and all men. They probably don't target men without college degrees. They way they probably get where they did was by successively narrowing down by selecting more attributes.
PeterisP 8y ago
The usual scenario is that you make a bunch of variants of an ad, do some testing and find out that option A works a bit better on women, option C works a bit better on men, and option B sucks; so then you'd run ad A targeting only women, and ad C targeting only men. You don't want to show ad C to any women since you have reasons to believe that showing ad A would be more effective for the same price.

carbocation 8y ago

As a legal layperson, to me it seems that the argument would focus around this topic: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/#application_and_hiring https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/#application_and_hiring Basically, I think the better lens is one that looks at discriminatory hiring practices, rather than one that looks at advertisements to a selected demographic.

Paul_Dessert 8y ago

Exactly. This doesn't necessarily mean these companies advertised the job to one gender. It simply means the ad was targeted at a specific gender. For all we know, the companies spent twice as much on a different ad set for women.

arnjerobben 8y ago
Why would they do that?
- edanm 8y ago
  Theoretically? For the same reason many companies have different advertisements that target different populations - because different advertisements play to different needs/desires, so you can engage with people in the most efficient way in terms of conversion.

bobthepanda 8y ago

No one is excluded though. A woman can buy Men's Health; a man can buy Cosmopolitan. What Facebook is doing is enabling straight up exclusion of genders from advertising, which is completely different in the eyes of the law.

maccio92 8y ago
So Victoria's secret should be forced to advertise to men too?
- jwassil 8y ago
  Pretty sure it does already :)
- colechristensen 8y ago
  No? How does that follow?
- wtvanhest 8y ago
  You can segment product advertising, but not housing or jobs or any other categories where there are 'protected classes' (US)
  - notyourday 8y ago
    I cannot wait until some enterprising man decides to apply to be a VS angel. It would be so glorious.
- Angostura 8y ago
  I imagine they make up a fair proportion of the customer base.
- chrisoverzero 8y ago
  Men buy lingerie.
- SilasX 8y ago
  Man, what an unimaginable dystopia, where VS’s hand were forced to the point where they made ads that played on men’s desires and were visually appealing to them ... /s If you mean, “what if they had to make ads that promoted men wearing their products”, I get your point, but I thought it was a funny ambiguity.

gascan 8y ago

While I see both sides of the argument, as long as the advertiser pays per view, it seems wrong to require the listing to target demographics that are almost certainly uninterested. Your example of listing a job in Men's Health but not Cosmopolitan seems good. Technically not a perfect analogue as a woman always could buy Men's Health, but in practice very similar. Spinning off into a different angle, what if an advertiser gets the most qualified female applicants advertising through LinkedIn, and the most qualified male applicants through Facebook? (Again assuming pay per view) Is it wrong for them to target women & men on separate platforms with separate ads? Utterly hypothetical of course. Or yet a different angle, what if they have ad "A" and ad "B", each subtly designed to excite one of the sexes. Perhaps an ad for the Marines, one emphasizing toughness & grit, the other emphasizing teamwork & "stronger together". Target one at men, one at women. Legal? To me it seems to come down to the overall behavior of the employer, not Facebook or any one ad.

detaro 8y ago
It seems wrong to allow companies to escape legal rules by choosing to advertise in ways that have badly-fitting payment model. The multiple ads question is interesting though, and might very well be a valid defense, since they then are advertising to both.
- gascan 8y ago
  Yes, I was thinking about that as I wrote, one imperfect but possible fix would be "no pay per view for job listings". Which, for all I know, could already be the case.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    The ads would still be illegal even if they weren't pay per view.
    - gascan 8y ago
      If they aren't pay per view, there's much less incentive to show them to only certain users, and much less burden on the employer to be inclusive.

nateberkopec 8y ago

> Would this be different if, for example, Facebook was targeting people for job ads based on "people who like action movies" or "people who like romance novels" (I'm stereotyping here, but just assume you pick a category that ends up being a decent proxy for gender)? No, this would still be illegal (in the US, anyway). The only difference is that Facebook wouldn't be aiding/abetting an illegal hiring practice. Employers can and have been penalized for hiring from homogenous applicant pools.

j16sdiz 8y ago
How about posting a job ad, disgusted as some other product ad? Should Facebook review each and every ad manually? This would put an end to self-service ad posting.

mreome 8y ago

Under the law it would different, none of your examples are protected classes, discrimination in employment is only illegal if the targeted/excluded group is a protected class, those being: men and women on the basis of sex; any group which shares a common race, religion, color, or national origin; people over 40; and people with physical or mental handicaps. The company I work for, for example, does not hire smokers (and makes this clear during hiring and makes the specifics part of our contracts), and this is perfectly legal. But it would be illegal to not hire anyone based on being in, or not being in, one of those specific protected classes. Now, if they were being used as proxies for those classes, then yes it would be illegal, but it would be up to a court to determine if that was the case. If I ran a company that made action movies "Must love action movies" being a basis for my hiring decisions is obviously not intended as a proxy for a protected class and would be legal. If my company makes printer paper, then I'm on shaky legal ground. That being said, I'm not sure if there are actually laws making it illegal to publish discriminatory job ads for someone, but Facebook assisting in illegal and discriminatory actions is an issue regardless of if their part is specifically illegal or not.

telaport 8y ago

You're telling me, if I run a clinic or rehab facility where women with trauma are more comfortable with other female therapists, I'm somehow required to advertise to and interview both men and women for a job - even when I'm only short on demand for a female therapist from a specific demographic or with certain qualifications? The same would go for a shortage of male employees based on patient or clientele requests and demands. I'm not saying Uber has a reason to do this. They may or may not, but to say this feature or ability is illegal is just idiotic. In fact, it's rather useful and worth paying for in my opinion.

evil-olive 8y ago
> If I run a clinic or rehab facility where women with trauma are more comfortable with other female therapists, I'm somehow required to advertise to and interview both men and women for a job No, you're not. This is a well-established area of the law, called a bona fide occupational qualification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi... > One example of bona fide occupational qualifications are mandatory retirement ages for bus drivers and airline pilots, for safety reasons. Further, in advertising, a manufacturer of men's clothing may lawfully advertise for male models. Religious belief may also be considered a BFOQ; for example, a religious school may lawfully require that members of its faculty be members of that denomination, and may lawfully bar from employment anyone who is not a member. Fire departments can require firemen to be able to lift a given weight to demonstrate that they will be able to carry fire victims out of a burning building.

Double_a_92 8y ago

What if they would advertise in a tech journal? Most readers are still probably male... But the journal is related to the job. Would that be discriminatory?

Endy 8y ago
No, because the point is that "most readers" are male. The advertisement should be unisex. If a woman picks up that journal - whether just looking for want ads or because they are legitimately interested in the topic - they should be considered with complete equity to any male candidate. The point isn't where you advertise, it's if you target. You can target by geography. You can target by education. You can't target by sex.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  You say equity, what innate advantage are you suggesting compensating for? Who needs extra help in this situation?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dogma1138 8y ago

I don’t know about the US but there are rules in regards to job postings in the UK and likely the EU at large that would make that a violation of anti-discrimination laws.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
I'm pretty sure I've seen adverts asking for women (but not the contrary); can you cite the legislation (at UK level is fine). rant incoming: Indeed in my small niche the almost exclusively female company owners, who always address group messages to "ladies", when enquiring about taking on employees always say "I'm thinking of taking on a girl, where should I advertise" or similar. Weekend help is "a Saturday girl". Ageism and sexism, completely unchallenged by all the feminists who are supposedly keen to see equality. Anyway .. carry on.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  It's allowed for some select cases when there is sufficient justification mainly in arts, education and entertainment.
- baud147258 8y ago
  In which niche are you working in?
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    It's a specific part of art/education/craft; not going to drill director further than that, sorry.
- glenndebacker 8y ago
  I can't speak for the UK but in Belgium it's certainly illegal to discriminate based on gender, age, race, .... There was even a case recently where a man won a lawsuit because he was excluded by a clothing store that was searching for a female employee for doing an inventory job. "Brussels, 23 August 2018 - The legal action taken by the Institute for Equality of Women and Men reminds employers that sex is not a criterion for refusing an application. The Leuven Labor Court has sentenced a clothing store to discrimination based on sex. He refused a man's candidacy because he wanted to hire a woman." https://presscenter.org/nl/pressrelease/20180822/een-sollicitant-weigeren-op-basis-van-geslacht-is-discriminatie https://presscenter.org/nl/pressrelease/20180822/een-sollici... (dutch) https://presscenter.org/nl/pressrelease/20180822/een-sollicitant-weigeren-op-basis-van-geslacht-is-discriminatie?lang=fr https://presscenter.org/nl/pressrelease/20180822/een-sollici... (french) That being said I also seen adverts asking for women but technically it's against the law and even with all those laws discriminations happen more often than not.

kazagistar 8y ago

Context matters. The question is one of harm... is it perpetuating or expanding an existing injustice or privilege, and to what extent? People who dislike action movies aren't the subject of any severe underrepresentation in a job market, so it's clearly not as big of a problem.

Muanh 8y ago
Do you have any data to back up this claim?

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

What if the ads were targeted at "people with an interest in driving"? I'm fairly sure the percentage of men that fall under that category is higher than women. I mean there's a bunch of car magazines that are gender neutral (that is, they avoid juvenile jokes or cat suit models), if there's an Uber ad in there it'd still mostly be men that read it.

fpoling 8y ago

Men’s health and FB operates at very different scales. FB ads can influence at the global scale and their discriminatory nature can bring potentially much more harm.

mdasen 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact 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 but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation." In fact, "absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures" that operate in a discriminatory manner. Unintentional discrimination is still discrimination. In a piece on age-based discrimination, Facebook said, "age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work." (https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-ads-age-discrimination-targeting https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-ads-age-discrimi...). I think a lot of the industry has been casual about job ads, but Facebook is kinda the first platform that really lets you be exact with a lot of your targeting. Before, maybe you feign ignorance that "Men's Health" doesn't have a lot of women readers. Plus, women can read Men's Health. However, I can't get Facebook ads targeted to a different gender. Facebook lets you be reasonably exacting. If I create a Facebook ad for a job application with no other promotion of the opening (including on my company's website) and target it just to men, is that discriminatory? IANAL, but in Griggs the court held that procedures that act as built-in headwinds for protected groups are illegal. Making it so that women could only hear about the job from a man seems like quite a headwind working against their likelihood of getting the job. Griggs is about job qualifications that were used as a proxy to keep black workers from getting jobs, but making it so that a group of potential workers can't even see the job application seems similar. Going back to your example: if someone used a gender proxy like "people who like action movies", I think it would be hard to defend in court. 1) They don't need to prove discriminatory intent, just disparate impact. 2) It seems likely that a company adopting such targeting would have communication indicating their discriminatory intent. "Facebook won't let us target by gender anymore! What can we do?" "Let's use things like action movies to get the same result!" If that comes out in discovery, it would seem like a simple case. 3) At some point, a court is going to want to know what the basis of that targeting was and it's going to sound really hollow. But it doesn't even matter if they come up with a good cover story, because even if it was unintentional, it can still fall afoul of the law. On the other hand, if I run a tech company and wanted to target "people you are into the Python programming language", that's a group that will likely skew male, but it kinda passes a sniff-test. It just doesn't smell funny. "Yeah, um, we want programmers and I thought targeting people into Python was reasonable." That does sound reasonable. It's not meant as a proxy for gender, but for an interest/skill that is closely related to the job. Action movies aren't related to my job, but a programming language is. Going back to the magazines: I think much of the same might apply, but I'm guessing that we've been relatively lax about it as a society. It might not feel inherently discriminatory, but disparate impact doesn't rely on intentional discrimination. You say, "that's just how advertising works," but you could easily place ads in multiple places to reach a wide variety of people. One program might not reflect the population at large, but I don't think it's rocket science to advertise in multiple places to reach a more representative sample. As I noted above, Facebook says that job targeting (at least on age) is an accepted industry practice. There are people that don't like the disparate impact theory (though it is established Supreme Court precedent since 1971). Plus, I don't know if disparate impact has ever been used in terms of narrowing the field before applications even come in. In Griggs, the procedure disproprotionately weeded out black applicants. In the Facebook case, those potential applicants never even knew the job existed. I have definitely thought the same things you've thought. Society is hard. Fairness is hard. But I think it's important that we work toward fairness. This isn't meant to be anti-company. I just think companies should have a bit of a justification for doing something if it runs contrary to fairness. If you're only advertising your programming jobs to people under 40, why? If the answer is, "we mostly don't want to hire older programmers, but if a good one happens to come along we'll take them", that doesn't feel like a great justification. In fact, it basically admits discrimination. If the answer is, "there are more young programmers than old programmers", I think the retort has to be, "given the loads of ways you can target, why not target based on interests rather than age or gender? Targeting to people interested in CS, various programming languages, etc. seems both better for you and for potential applicants...unless you're trying to discriminate." It's not always simple, straight-forward, or easy, but I think we're trying to build a better, more fair society and that requires hard-work and questioning.

onetimemanytime 8y ago

>>but it doesn't feel inherently discriminatory to advertise a job in, say, "Men's Health" but not "Cosmopolitan" magazine. Similar but still very different argument. A woman can pick up Men's Health but FB ads just don't show up in her stream. Also Uber specifically and purposefully left women out, unless they say, "oh, we clicked the checkbox by mistake" ("or didn't click the women one..." )

wruza 8y ago

Anyone can buy Cosmopolitan and read ads, but no one can pretend for being someone other on fb/etc. If zuck and alphabet provided options to tune your profile card and live the other live for a while, an argument would be over and ads would not suffer. Default settings rule the world anyway. People could also escape few echo chambers as a side effect.

bluto 8y ago

Re the FB example and action movies. Action movies are not a protected Federal class as are age, race, sex, religion, and national origin.

johnchristopher 8y ago

> That's just how advertising works. Is that crazy? Why should advertising be considered the default or the correct method ? People still need jobs to feed themselves and their loved ones. It's about their survival and oppression and discrimination is still a thing. Would there be a debate if ethnic was used instead of gender ?

anthony_romeo 8y ago

Let's say that a man has a subscription to The New York Times, but the NYT chooses to print a Men's version that has some job postings and a Women's version that has other job postings without telling you. What if the man is a cosmetologist and isn't seeing any cosmetology job postings because they're all in the Women's edition? The issue with targeting by sex is that it presupposes interest in certain areas, and while a person's interests can change, a person's sex can't [without significant medical intervention].

will_brown 8y ago

>I'm a bit mixed about this; it is clearly discriminatory to publish a job ad that says "women need not apply", In general that is discrimination, but as with all things in law the general rule only exists for exceptions. One exception is a “Bonafide occupational qualification”...some famous cases involve men playboy, hooters, and Abercrombie and Fitch (though A&F was a case of discrimition against blacks, which A&F attempted to defend by arguing being white was a bonafide occupation qualification because it fit their overall marketing and target demographic).

throw2016 8y ago

This is not lifestyle advertising. Tenders, job ads and other categories that require equal access and transparency have rules to prevent exactly this kind of discrimination and skullduggery. Facebook had made an error here, as has Uber and this is a pretty straightforward violation.

tapatio 8y ago

Yes. "People who like action movies" and "people who like romance novels" are not protected classes.