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

353 points by shrikant 7y ago

x0x0 7y ago
Wow, I didn't expect to see CapitalOne or Edward Jones on that list. I kind of figured it would be a bunch of smaller companies that were either ignorant of the law or, more likely, used to playing fast and loose without consequences.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  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.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    Being deliberate is not required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
    - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      > “Where a disparate impact is shown, the plaintiff can prevail without the necessity of showing intentional discrimination unless the defendant employer demonstrates that the practice or policy in question has a demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job in question.[3] This is the "business necessity" defense.[1]” I wonder if you could argue that advertising in a particular way is a business necessity because without doing so, the business cannot maintain competitive viability in reaching necessary candidates. Just for a devil’s advocate example, suppose that travelling to university recruiting fairs to recruit for computer science job listings has a disparate impact against female candidates, because the gender composition of university programs in computer science are heavily skewed towards male applicants. But university program graduates may be the only qualified type of candidate for the position, so simply not targeting candidates in the male-overrepresented way (i.e. not attending these university job fairs) would be debilitating and hugely damaging for employers who require those qualified candidates to be competitive in the market.
      - yawaramin 7y ago
        Yes, the hypothetical you described is one potential scenario of the line you quoted: > ... unless the defendant employer demonstrates that the practice or policy in question has a demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job in question.[3] This is the "business necessity" defense.[1]” But it's still just a hypothetical. The only way to get more certainty is for you to hire a lawyer to advise you on the matter. The only way to get absolute certainty is to actually carry out the scenario and go through a lawsuit :-)
      - shkkmo 7y ago
        You can have an employment policy that favors CS grads when hiring programmers because, while the policy is effectively discriminatory, you can show that it directly relates to the job being hired for.
        mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        It seems this would easily extend to many more types of job recruitment targeting then too, no? Or at least targeting job ads seems like it would be done for the exact same reasons as favoring CS grads in recruitment, until clearly proven otherwise?
    - ConradKilroy 7y ago
      As a wikipedian, wow thank you, I love learning vital descriptive terms.
    - macspoofing 7y ago
      Sure, but it changes the optics from those companies doing actively something nefarious, to doing it accidentally out of ignorance of the underlying technologies.
  - uberman 7y ago
    As the test case I feel it is rather unlikely. One typically goes after the sure offender.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    It’s interesting to imagine a hypothetical. Suppose a company chose an ad targeting segment with perfect 50/50 historical probability of a viewer being of either traditional male / female gender identity given they are in the segment. Now suppose through some weird fluke, the ads are actually only delivered to people of one single gender classification. Has the company done everything required of them by trying to target an equal mix along this particular characteristic dimension that society attaches a legal criteria to? Or has the company failed to do what is required because they merely tried to target 50/50 but failed to guarantee that it actually happened? Then flip it around. Suppose a company targets an ad segment that is 100% male because they are actively discriminating against women. But through some fluke of ad delivery they actually show the ad to a 50/50 mix. Are they free of committing a crime because nobody ended up being discriminated against? Or have they committed a crime merely by trying to target a certain subset of the population with a disapproved set of characteristics? To me it begs a question of whether the company’s legal obligation occurs at the level of defining who to try to target, at the level of who is actually targeted (even if it is executed by a third party), or both? A further interesting question is that if this applies to one type of resource (jobs) does it also apply to others like plain old goods and services? Suppose a sporting goods company knows that only 100% males have ever bought their merchandise or expresssed willingness to buy in market research. Is the company legally obligated to still show ads to women? If not, what is the underlying criteria that supposedly separates job listings from product listings? Another interesting question is whether accidental correlation with mix of the targeted audience also results in blame. What if you target a set of people with behavioral characteristics A, B and C. None of them has any obvious connection to gender, sexual orientation, etc., but it turns out they are heavily correlated and (honestly) nobody knew ahead of time (maybe even the correlation is seasonal and prior data could not have shown it). Does this make the company responsible?
    - toss1 7y ago
      For your examples of intent vs actual net targeting, it is not unreasonable to expect that an employer check the actual results of their targeting selections and ensure that they produce sound results. "what is the underlying criteria that supposedly separates job listings from product listings?" It is called Equal Opportunity Employment Law. If you want to employ someone, you MUST give equal opportunity, and cannot discriminate based on any of the protected classes (and ignorance of the law is no excuse). Re your various characteristics, again, you MUST check your results for parity of results. Your example of "oh, I'm just targeting these particular characteristics and I had no idea that they happened to correlate 100% with young white males, oh my!", would provide such an easy work-aroud the EEO laws as to make them worthless. So, no, you can't do that.
- mharroun 7y ago
  Thoes companies in particular expend capital on platforms to purposefully try to get at least more diversity in job applications so if anything it seems counter productive. (Disclaimer: I work for such a platform)
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    Several companies were only found to be discriminating based on age which is far less popular with diversity programs and diversity activism (alongside disability and religion) when compared to gender and race.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
paulpauper 7y ago
it's called ad targeting. If the govt. wants to pay for those low converting clicks/impressions, then i'm sure they, these employers, will be glad to serve ads to everyone.
- deogeo 7y ago
  The government doesn't pay for the cost of unleaded gasoline/work safety standards/food safety/building codes - why should this case be different?
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Stating the name in a snide way to imply ignorance on the part of people criticizing it reflects poorly on you. It's illegal to target some kinds of ads this way, so tough luck.
- toss1 7y ago
  Yes, and the very assumption in that statement -- that those clicks/impressions will be low-converting -- is itself discriminatory. The conversion rate for each demographic is irrelevant in relation to the protected classes. Every person has an equal right to see the adverts and apply or not, according to their decision. That is what it means to be an Equal Opportunity Employer -- it is the employers' responsibility to bear the costs of giving every person an equal opportunity. And, frankly, not being an equal-opportunity employer, especially in times of high employment rates, is simply stupid -- you bypass a lot of available talent for no good reason (& no, your biases and assumptions are not good reasons).
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  You don't have to pay people to follow the law. They can either comply or face consequences.
tdurden 7y ago
So does this mean that targeted ads are now considered discrimination?
- profunctor 7y ago
  It seems to be a textbook form of discrimination.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    It's not, though. When I buy a page in Cosmo or something, I'm doing that with the intent and result that mostly women will see it. If targeted ads were illegal, it's hard to see how any publication with non-representative demographics could sell ads at all.
    - mav3rick 7y ago
      Yes but you don't control if a man or an old person can buy the magazine or not.
      - air7 7y ago
        While true, its a bit of a nitpick and misses the point GP made.
        Barrin92 7y ago
        not really, because people are aware of the fact that they're going to find say, women targeted ads in cosmo, so they can seek them out. The 'discrimination' in this case is simply aggregate consumer preference, every individual outlier still gets precisely the content and ads they want. If facebook displays housing ads only to white people a black person is very likely not even aware that they're being discriminated against in some specific way, the entire control is in the hands of facebook and the ad buyer, and intransparent. The situation would be equivalent if facebook gave you complete control over their algorithm and let you choose what type of ads you want to be exposed to. Which would make discrimination much less of an issue. Or the other way around, the current facebook situation would be akin to the store owner quickly cutting the housing ads out of cosmo as soon as black people walk into the store.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
This is huge, but in a way perhaps not obvious. I am trying to define a thing called a programmable company - it's where all the actions a company can make are scripted / scriptable - and weirdly it's what the law assumes exists right now - that a company has a controlling mind. I am trying to say that automation and governance belong hand in hand.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
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 must be a better way than what we are doing currently." Maybe if we worked on solving that issue we would see less of this issue. Like if it is a job for writing HTML and you write HTML, there are ways to find you based on that and it won't matter what your gender or age is.
- nefitty 7y ago
  This is a great idea. What about a service that allows proctored skills tests for applicants? Like Sitepoint but with some additional verification layers. Hiring managers would then pick a tech stack or set of skills they need, and matches would bubble up based on applicants in the area with the relevant skills. The "culture fit" question could be another egg to crack. Who knows if interviews are the best way to figure that out...
  - hysan 7y ago
    Any process that attempts to “solve” the technical skills verification problem will not work unless it replaces the technical portion of the on-site interview. Otherwise, companies can still reject based on technical assessments in which case you’ve solved nothing. You’ve simply changed the shape of the hiring funnel. Also, looking beyond the immediate need, companies would also need to understand that this only applies to very specific positions. You shouldn’t apply this to entry level, nor should you apply this to positions where the employee is expected to adapt quickly to changing tech stacks. What this leaves you with is contracting. You hire experts with a very specific skillset that you need that is verified by an agency. For everything else, there is still not a good generic solution.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      You’ve simply changed the shape of the hiring funnel. Sometimes, that's enough to make a real difference. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
mcguire 7y ago
A linked article has examples. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-discrimination-housing-race-sex-national-origin https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc... Here's one: https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20171121-facebook-judaism.jpg https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20171121-faceb...
eloff 7y ago
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 because there's less of them as a percentage of the population. I shouldn't have the government mandating that I can't tune my advertising campaign for ROI, which is basically the only point of running one if the first place. However, on the other side of the coin that's pretty unfair because clearly there are good software engineers in those demographics and I'd be excluding them to save money. I think both alternatives suck in different ways, but as a business I'd probably choose ROI over fair. It's all pretty hypothetical though, because Facebook ads are probably one of the worst ways I can think of to find candidates.
- deepnotderp 7y ago
  If all/most employers exclude workers based on demographics, then smart employers will realize that they can find great employees in those demographics. A good portion of Quant trading is based off a similar principle. If I can model priors and variance better than my competitors, I can make money.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    It isn’t that simple. In my local talent market, big FAANGs + Microsoft-style companies have been aggressively recruiting female SWEs, creating even starker imbalances in smaller tech companies + startups. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for those companies to completely give up on finding women to hire, because that supply is limited (at least until the educational pipeline catches up). And it kind of makes sense: it will take a few more years for supply in the industry to actually increase (especially for senior talent), while companies like Google are under the spotlight now and no one really cares about that 10 developer payroll company that Google poached talent from. (Not to mention employment laws work different for companies of different sizes) To put it in trading terms, if your bigger competitors are sucking up all the supply of X, then you simply don’t worry about buying X if you can get by with Y anyways.
ga-vu 7y ago
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?
- aVx1uyD5pYWW 7y ago
  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/ 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.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/business/facebook-job-ads...
  - ga-vu 7y ago
    Hi there, reporter!
- kjs3 7y ago
  Should we ignore it's still going on?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
undefined3840 7y ago
The dirty secret of hiring is that employers are always thinking about cost, but how many employees out there think of themselves as a cost to a bottom line? Not many. The most exploitable tech workers are young, single, males on H1-b visas. They will take a low salary and essentially be enslaved to their job because getting fired means getting kicked out of the country. Old workers and women are more “expensive” because they use more healthcare than young single males. We must totally disconnect employers from healthcare once and for all. We must also reform the H1-b system and stop employers from having so much leverage over vulnerable employees due to their visa status. Point is, it’s not as if employers think young men are superior talents to women or older workers, it’s that they are by far the cheapest and most exploitable. We need to remove these incentives (or disincentives) that distort the hiring process and allow these discriminatory behaviors to bubble up in the first place.
- thekashifmalik 7y ago
  My man! Best analysis I've seen. I'm familiar with the H1B situation and you are very much spot on. Young dudes will work hard, keep their head down and take a terrible salary as long as there is the promise of citizenship at the end of the tunnel.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  Older workers will still demand to be paid more than younger workers, since they have more experience.
  - kjs3 7y ago
    Well....they don't, per se, demand it. They are worth it because they have more experience. The issue is that even the ones who will accept less than their worth aren't considered because of various biases that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job.
- geebee 7y ago
  On a related note, you've nailed a big problem I have with encouraging women to go into IT. How I can I enthusiastically recommend this field for women when I have reservations about recommending it to anyone? The reasons I'd be hesitant to encourage my daughter to go into IT are largely the same reasons I'd be hesitant to encourage it for my son And the remaining reasons specific only to a woman may be present in every field, perhaps to a greater extent. People compare nursing to software development, and by national numbers, yes, software pays more. But out here in San Francisco, ground zero for the "shortage" of software engineers (so grave that apparently it imperils the entire US economy and national security), an application developer, until very recently (like, last couple of years, according to BLS stats), earned less than a registered nurse. Here are the latest numbers. Software developer (San Francisco): ~147k/yr https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope... Registered nurse (San Francisco): ~140k/yr https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/... The data is a bit hard to parse, because here are specialties of programmer and nurse that pay more, and less, than these numbers (nurse anesthetist, for example, earn much more). There are variable pay issues to consider - tech workers may have options, but then again, nurses who work for government or university hospitals often have very good pension packages (the kind that were once commonplace but are now extinct in the private sector). And UCSF fired a bunch of IT workers after telling them to train their H1B replacements, try that on the nurse's union (seriously, see what happens). I think that things like maternity leave are probably better in nursing as well. In any case, while it isn't clear that nursing is necessarily a better field, it is absolutely not clear, in any way, that it's a worse choice from a financial and career/job stability. Tech goes through this on a pretty regular cycle. The CEOs ask the market what it costs to get talented people who would like to do something meaningful with their life what kind of salary they'd need to agree to work on photo sharing apps in a giant open office in a place where a crappy 2 br house runs well above a million. It turns out people with options kinda prefer other options, like, say becoming a nurse practitioner. The market answers, the CEOs don't like it, so they have the government ask again on their behalf. The government responds by granting these CEOs and their HR departments control over a shadow immigration system, where they get to decide who does and doesn't get to live in the uS and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain here. Those conditions, it turns out often involve being a developer in the valley - because that's what the country needs, right? Meanwhile, the people with the right to choose a career path consistent with their interests, life ambitions, and financial needs (what we call the "free folk", those who either inherited citizenship at birth, have a relative here, purchased it through various investments, or earned it through 7-10 years of employment at a tech company that sponsors and controls their green card application) often decide that they'd rather do something else. I'm hardly going to discourage someone with free choice from choosing an different option, especially when so many of those other options provide meaningful and fulfilling work at reasonable salaries (and don't involve tech interview tests or open offices).
foobar1962 7y ago
Posting a job on social media -- and not dedicated job sites -- is already reducing the number of people likely to see the listing. A lot of people don't use social media. I did a digital marketing course and have met a few digital marketers. When asked if they use social media themselves, most if not all answer "oh GOD no."
- underwater 7y ago
  You can choose whether to use social media or not. You can't choose your gender.
manigandham 7y ago
The simple question is: Does everyone have an equal opportunity to this position or not? If you can't even see the ads then the answer is no, and so it's a violation. If there were different ads for different groups but everyone still had the opportunity to see, apply and acquire the position then it's fair game. Perhaps Facebook could improve job ads to allow for more specific targeting but always have a fallback ad in that campaign for any non-targeted users. This would help employers without excluding anyone.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  > The simple question is: Does everyone have an equal opportunity to this position or not? If you can't even see the ads then the answer is no, and so it's a violation. Do these cases involve advertising positions that are not listed elsewhere? Because obviously no company can afford to reach everyone who might be interested in a position. I would agree that selective advertising would be much more of a problem if the positions are not listed on employers' websites.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    I'm not sure if there is a perfect answer there. It might be best to scope it down to a certain medium and channel and say that all users on that channel have the ability to either see the ad or browse a directory of all listings. If Facebook also had a jobs board that anyone can search and find ads where employers aren't paying for impressions then I think that would offset a targeted campaign to select groups.
- WomanCanCode 7y ago
  I agree. As a female software developer, I would like to see those ads so I can get better jobs. If I don't even see the ads, then I would not even know about opportunity. Without opportunity, I cannot really progress. If only men see the ads, apply jobs and get interviews, then the employers may think that they shouldn't advertise to women. This is just circular thinking.
  - 7y ago
gnicholas 7y ago
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 I don't know what goes into the algorithm of creating lookalike audiences — for example, how important gender is versus interests.
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  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.
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    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
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      Disparate impact (without valid justification) and discriminatory intent are both illegal.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  Yes, easily because only thing that is necessary (in the US) is the disparate effect of your employment policies (edit: and the relevancy of those policies to the position being filled): > The laws enforced by EEOC prohibit an employer or other covered entity from using neutral employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative effect on applicants or employees of a particular race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), or national origin, or on an individual with a disability or class of individuals with disabilities, if the polices or practices at issue are not job-related and necessary to the operation of the business. [0] [0] https://www.eeoc.gov//laws/practices/ https://www.eeoc.gov//laws/practices/
dlphn___xyz 7y ago
this doesnt seem like a bad thing imo - tech has always favors young applicants
- kjs3 7y ago
  You're going to age too. Don't wait until employers say "screw you" before you care.
lonelappde 7y ago
Facebook studies every details of its users lives, so why on Earth is targeting job are by gender an effective choice? Is all that other behavioral data useless for targeting? Is personalized advertising a fraudulent industry?
WomanCanCode 7y ago
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
- mysterydip 7y ago
  To me that's a good thing and a reason to work less in the office. Your brain is still working on the problem while you're out doing other things. I've had multiple occasions where I didn't find the solution to an issue while staring at the screen, but rather that evening or the next morning while at home.
- dlp211 7y ago
  Stop giving your employer free labor.
slics 7y ago
From the comments below on testing one’s experience, I don’t think that there is a way to actually test one’s soft skill experience, and if they are the right candidate for the job, other than leveraging the networking aspect for recommending a candidate for a job. One important requirement for a senior executive job these days is their Soft Skills. If you can find a way to measure that, well you have solved a major issue.
aussieguy1234 7y ago
Not just Facebook, but any targeted advertising platform that can target based on demographic could do this. Its not the first example of unethical behaviour using this technology. Alcohol gets targeted to Alcholics, Gambling gets targets to problem gamblers. Targeted advertising for certain purposes should be illegal, including employment ads, alcohol ads, gambing ads and any kind of political ad. There's just too many ways it can go wrong with these kinds of ads.
- erichocean 7y ago
  Or we could outright ban advertising everywhere, for any reason, full stop.
  - dschuetz 7y ago
    Well. That's not as easy as you think. Most companies believe that without ads they'd lose to competition.
    - jackvalentine 7y ago
      So their only differentiator is they advertise and their competitors don’t?
      - cwkoss 7y ago
        sounds like brands that society would he healthier without
  - greggman2 7y ago
    Interesting. You just advertised an idea. That should be banned?
    - basq 7y ago
      Think it's safe to assume gp meant paid advertising.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rjf72 7y ago
I understand the reason some people are upset with this, but one issue I find interesting is that this is exactly how 'fair' advertising works, but implicitly. For instance if I advertise a position in, as some random example, Popular Mechanics, I'm going to get an extremely biased sample. And I'm putting my position there specifically because I want to appeal to that demographic. This is also why, for instance, in times past if you stayed at home and watched broadcast television there would be a disproportionate number of ads for things such as tampons, diapers (adult and child alike), and job injury lawyers. It was targeting the demographic watching television at that time. Perhaps one fair solution here would be an opt-in demographic profile override. What a mouth full. What I mean is that if you want, you can require Facebook to set your demographics to whatever you like. In other words, imagine you're a woman and you want to be shown ads targeting men, well you can opt-in to require your account profile to be a hit for man or woman. The curious thing is that I imagine almost nobody would actually choose to opt-in there. It'd probably be more used as a protest tool to destroy the value of advertising (by large numbers of people opting into everything), than a tool to get more ads you're interested in. Can't say I'm particularly upset by that outcome though.
peteretep 7y ago
> 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 headline should be the second half of it, which is: "After two years the Federal Government confirms demographic advertising of jobs is illegal"
- MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
  Seems pointless to me. What are they gonna do, hire those folks they meant to exclude anyway when they show up?
  - black_puppydog 7y ago
    While we're at it: why bother with any sort of anti-discrimination effort? Haters' gonna hate after all. /s
    - hutzlibu 7y ago
      There is a difference between accepting discrimination, or trying to enforce antidiscrimination. Make such things open, talk and discuss about it, yes! But when you discriminate to counter discrimination for example, than I believe something went wrong.
  - quietbritishjim 7y ago
    It depends. If the goal was to exclude women or old people no matter how qualified they are then you're right, they could just be excluded at a later stage. But if goal was to save money or reach more relevant people based on the assumption that there are fewer old people and women with necessary qualifications then they actually might hire them once they've applied. Now I think about it, even in the first case it could make a difference. Rejecting an application from a real individual based on prejudice might be harder to do, due to a stronger feeling of wrongness, than just unchecking a box labelled "female".
robk 7y ago
Why would employers not target women?
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  At the steel mill where several of my cousins worked there was never, ever a female applicant for positions on the factory floor, in 50 years. Why pay for adds that nobody will care for? Same for kindergartens in my country, there is no male care taker (not sure what is the right name, it is not a teaching position) in the entire country. Why advertise it to men? If you want to hire junior developers, for example, why pay adds to people over 50 years old? Chances they will never apply for a junior position in the field.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- cryptozeus 7y ago
  Biases
stakhanov 7y ago
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?
- Dude2029 7y ago
  Because it's the current year and men never complain.
- adrianN 7y ago
  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.
  - abbasaamer 7y ago
    That's a poor comparison and I think most people understand that, even if the current environment discourages them from admitting it.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      Why do you think that it's a poor comparison?
      - GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago
        there are more homeless men than women. So that's like targeting men to give free food and shelter because more men need it, which wouldn't happen.
        ptah 7y ago
        i think you are trying to stretch the metaphor too far
cryptozeus 7y ago
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.
- unionpivo 7y ago
  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.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    Don't even look away. Just accept that people do differ by birth characteristics and that there are often legitimate reasons to discriminate based on those factors. There's no shame in that. Look at firefighters. To get a female firefighter in New York they had to lower the strength tests. Those tests were calibrated to be able to carry people out of a burning building. Do you really want a 'process' that one tiny step at a time leads to people eventually burning to death because their rescuer was a tiny 5ft girl who couldn't lift them? https://nypost.com/2015/05/03/woman-to-become-ny-firefighter-despite-failing-crucial-fitness-test/ https://nypost.com/2015/05/03/woman-to-become-ny-firefighter... Or more prosaically, do you think men should be lingerie models? Or people too old to run should be hired to take care of very young children?
    - unionpivo 7y ago
      I Disagree with you on the word "often". There are far many jobs where physical body doesn't matter (and even there, you wont accept fat young guy either, so you might as well just list what do you expect candidate to be able to preform), than those that do. Now lets look at a story in question: > In the latest rulings, the EEOC cited four companies for age discrimination: > Capital One, Edwards Jones, Enterprise Holdings and DriveTime Automotive Group. > Three companies were cited for discrimination by both age and gender: Nebraska Furniture Mart, > Renewal by Andersen LLC and Sandhills Publishing Company. No firefighters, no lingerie models ( I thought there were male underwear models). As far as who do I expect to become firefighter ? Anyone who can do the job. If it means only males can do the job (I have no idea hoe true that is), I am fine with that exception. But if there is a woman who can lift just as much as average firefighter, and want to do the job, why would you prevent her from doing it ?
sdfmmkmsdfmk 7y ago
Why force businesses to waste money on advertising to and interviewing people they don't want to hire? At the end of the day, some person will get a job. Why is it better if a woman or old person gets the job? Enforcing diversity hiring practices is not creating more jobs for anyone (except diversity advisors, granted). On the contrary, it increases the cost of doing business, which is likely to reduce demand for employees.
- ptah 7y ago
  most studies show that diversity leads to increased productivity and innovation. it actually reduces the cost of doing business significantly. this is the only reason big corporates are doing it as they are purely driven by their bottom line
donmatito 7y ago
I came to read "and what about the men? Men are discriminated against too", was not disappointed
fffjdtcsebj 7y ago
Last year my main competitor went on a diversity hire drive. After hiring a bunch they tried to fire one of them due to poor performance. It ended up as a legal battle that is still ongoing. A number of the the other diversity hires got the message that they were now unfirable and decided to start slacking off as well. Now work there is pretty much frozen and they're bleeding customers. Im told they're 6 months away from mass layoffs. This company dominated my industry. I always planned on the taillight following strategy where you follow a leading company and wait for them to screw up. I'm now happily taking full advantage of their situation. I actually have a way more 'diverse' staff. I offshored the work (and myself) to a non-white country where for a weird historical reason this work was mostly done by women. The main difference is that they're not a protected class here so I don't have to worry about lawsuits. The most lucrative customers will only buy American so once my competitor goes under I'll open up a US office which will mean exposure to US laws but by that stage I'll be ready to package the company off and sell it to someone else to worry about.
- teachrdan 7y ago
  I want to apply the principal of generosity here, but the fact that your post perfectly illustrates the alleged perils of hiring non-white or Asian men--from a new account no less!--makes me wonder if anything resembling this story ever happened. Then again, everything in your narrative is so vague it's literally impossible to disprove.
  - astura 7y ago
    Do people really know such detailed information of the HR issues of their competitors? Plus it just sounds like a shit post - "You can't hire black people, they'll just slack off and sue you when you fire them."
Eucatastrophe 7y ago
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.

353 points by shrikant 7y ago

x0x0 7y ago

Wow, I didn't expect to see CapitalOne or Edward Jones on that list. I kind of figured it would be a bunch of smaller companies that were either ignorant of the law or, more likely, used to playing fast and loose without consequences.

macspoofing 7y ago
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.
- deogeo 7y ago
  Being deliberate is not required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    > “Where a disparate impact is shown, the plaintiff can prevail without the necessity of showing intentional discrimination unless the defendant employer demonstrates that the practice or policy in question has a demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job in question.[3] This is the "business necessity" defense.[1]” I wonder if you could argue that advertising in a particular way is a business necessity because without doing so, the business cannot maintain competitive viability in reaching necessary candidates. Just for a devil’s advocate example, suppose that travelling to university recruiting fairs to recruit for computer science job listings has a disparate impact against female candidates, because the gender composition of university programs in computer science are heavily skewed towards male applicants. But university program graduates may be the only qualified type of candidate for the position, so simply not targeting candidates in the male-overrepresented way (i.e. not attending these university job fairs) would be debilitating and hugely damaging for employers who require those qualified candidates to be competitive in the market.
    - yawaramin 7y ago
      Yes, the hypothetical you described is one potential scenario of the line you quoted: > ... unless the defendant employer demonstrates that the practice or policy in question has a demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job in question.[3] This is the "business necessity" defense.[1]” But it's still just a hypothetical. The only way to get more certainty is for you to hire a lawyer to advise you on the matter. The only way to get absolute certainty is to actually carry out the scenario and go through a lawsuit :-)
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      You can have an employment policy that favors CS grads when hiring programmers because, while the policy is effectively discriminatory, you can show that it directly relates to the job being hired for.
      - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        It seems this would easily extend to many more types of job recruitment targeting then too, no? Or at least targeting job ads seems like it would be done for the exact same reasons as favoring CS grads in recruitment, until clearly proven otherwise?
  - ConradKilroy 7y ago
    As a wikipedian, wow thank you, I love learning vital descriptive terms.
  - macspoofing 7y ago
    Sure, but it changes the optics from those companies doing actively something nefarious, to doing it accidentally out of ignorance of the underlying technologies.
- uberman 7y ago
  As the test case I feel it is rather unlikely. One typically goes after the sure offender.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  It’s interesting to imagine a hypothetical. Suppose a company chose an ad targeting segment with perfect 50/50 historical probability of a viewer being of either traditional male / female gender identity given they are in the segment. Now suppose through some weird fluke, the ads are actually only delivered to people of one single gender classification. Has the company done everything required of them by trying to target an equal mix along this particular characteristic dimension that society attaches a legal criteria to? Or has the company failed to do what is required because they merely tried to target 50/50 but failed to guarantee that it actually happened? Then flip it around. Suppose a company targets an ad segment that is 100% male because they are actively discriminating against women. But through some fluke of ad delivery they actually show the ad to a 50/50 mix. Are they free of committing a crime because nobody ended up being discriminated against? Or have they committed a crime merely by trying to target a certain subset of the population with a disapproved set of characteristics? To me it begs a question of whether the company’s legal obligation occurs at the level of defining who to try to target, at the level of who is actually targeted (even if it is executed by a third party), or both? A further interesting question is that if this applies to one type of resource (jobs) does it also apply to others like plain old goods and services? Suppose a sporting goods company knows that only 100% males have ever bought their merchandise or expresssed willingness to buy in market research. Is the company legally obligated to still show ads to women? If not, what is the underlying criteria that supposedly separates job listings from product listings? Another interesting question is whether accidental correlation with mix of the targeted audience also results in blame. What if you target a set of people with behavioral characteristics A, B and C. None of them has any obvious connection to gender, sexual orientation, etc., but it turns out they are heavily correlated and (honestly) nobody knew ahead of time (maybe even the correlation is seasonal and prior data could not have shown it). Does this make the company responsible?
  - toss1 7y ago
    For your examples of intent vs actual net targeting, it is not unreasonable to expect that an employer check the actual results of their targeting selections and ensure that they produce sound results. "what is the underlying criteria that supposedly separates job listings from product listings?" It is called Equal Opportunity Employment Law. If you want to employ someone, you MUST give equal opportunity, and cannot discriminate based on any of the protected classes (and ignorance of the law is no excuse). Re your various characteristics, again, you MUST check your results for parity of results. Your example of "oh, I'm just targeting these particular characteristics and I had no idea that they happened to correlate 100% with young white males, oh my!", would provide such an easy work-aroud the EEO laws as to make them worthless. So, no, you can't do that.
mharroun 7y ago
Thoes companies in particular expend capital on platforms to purposefully try to get at least more diversity in job applications so if anything it seems counter productive. (Disclaimer: I work for such a platform)
- shkkmo 7y ago
  Several companies were only found to be discriminating based on age which is far less popular with diversity programs and diversity activism (alongside disability and religion) when compared to gender and race.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

paulpauper 7y ago

it's called ad targeting. If the govt. wants to pay for those low converting clicks/impressions, then i'm sure they, these employers, will be glad to serve ads to everyone.

deogeo 7y ago
The government doesn't pay for the cost of unleaded gasoline/work safety standards/food safety/building codes - why should this case be different?
anigbrowl 7y ago
Stating the name in a snide way to imply ignorance on the part of people criticizing it reflects poorly on you. It's illegal to target some kinds of ads this way, so tough luck.
toss1 7y ago
Yes, and the very assumption in that statement -- that those clicks/impressions will be low-converting -- is itself discriminatory. The conversion rate for each demographic is irrelevant in relation to the protected classes. Every person has an equal right to see the adverts and apply or not, according to their decision. That is what it means to be an Equal Opportunity Employer -- it is the employers' responsibility to bear the costs of giving every person an equal opportunity. And, frankly, not being an equal-opportunity employer, especially in times of high employment rates, is simply stupid -- you bypass a lot of available talent for no good reason (& no, your biases and assumptions are not good reasons).
michaelmrose 7y ago
You don't have to pay people to follow the law. They can either comply or face consequences.

tdurden 7y ago

So does this mean that targeted ads are now considered discrimination?

profunctor 7y ago
It seems to be a textbook form of discrimination.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  It's not, though. When I buy a page in Cosmo or something, I'm doing that with the intent and result that mostly women will see it. If targeted ads were illegal, it's hard to see how any publication with non-representative demographics could sell ads at all.
  - mav3rick 7y ago
    Yes but you don't control if a man or an old person can buy the magazine or not.
    - air7 7y ago
      While true, its a bit of a nitpick and misses the point GP made.
      - Barrin92 7y ago
        not really, because people are aware of the fact that they're going to find say, women targeted ads in cosmo, so they can seek them out. The 'discrimination' in this case is simply aggregate consumer preference, every individual outlier still gets precisely the content and ads they want. If facebook displays housing ads only to white people a black person is very likely not even aware that they're being discriminated against in some specific way, the entire control is in the hands of facebook and the ad buyer, and intransparent. The situation would be equivalent if facebook gave you complete control over their algorithm and let you choose what type of ads you want to be exposed to. Which would make discrimination much less of an issue. Or the other way around, the current facebook situation would be akin to the store owner quickly cutting the housing ads out of cosmo as soon as black people walk into the store.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

This is huge, but in a way perhaps not obvious. I am trying to define a thing called a programmable company - it's where all the actions a company can make are scripted / scriptable - and weirdly it's what the law assumes exists right now - that a company has a controlling mind. I am trying to say that automation and governance belong hand in hand.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

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 must be a better way than what we are doing currently." Maybe if we worked on solving that issue we would see less of this issue. Like if it is a job for writing HTML and you write HTML, there are ways to find you based on that and it won't matter what your gender or age is.

nefitty 7y ago
This is a great idea. What about a service that allows proctored skills tests for applicants? Like Sitepoint but with some additional verification layers. Hiring managers would then pick a tech stack or set of skills they need, and matches would bubble up based on applicants in the area with the relevant skills. The "culture fit" question could be another egg to crack. Who knows if interviews are the best way to figure that out...
- hysan 7y ago
  Any process that attempts to “solve” the technical skills verification problem will not work unless it replaces the technical portion of the on-site interview. Otherwise, companies can still reject based on technical assessments in which case you’ve solved nothing. You’ve simply changed the shape of the hiring funnel. Also, looking beyond the immediate need, companies would also need to understand that this only applies to very specific positions. You shouldn’t apply this to entry level, nor should you apply this to positions where the employee is expected to adapt quickly to changing tech stacks. What this leaves you with is contracting. You hire experts with a very specific skillset that you need that is verified by an agency. For everything else, there is still not a good generic solution.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    You’ve simply changed the shape of the hiring funnel. Sometimes, that's enough to make a real difference. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule

mcguire 7y ago

A linked article has examples. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-discrimination-housing-race-sex-national-origin https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc... Here's one: https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20171121-facebook-judaism.jpg https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20171121-faceb...

eloff 7y ago

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 because there's less of them as a percentage of the population. I shouldn't have the government mandating that I can't tune my advertising campaign for ROI, which is basically the only point of running one if the first place. However, on the other side of the coin that's pretty unfair because clearly there are good software engineers in those demographics and I'd be excluding them to save money. I think both alternatives suck in different ways, but as a business I'd probably choose ROI over fair. It's all pretty hypothetical though, because Facebook ads are probably one of the worst ways I can think of to find candidates.

deepnotderp 7y ago
If all/most employers exclude workers based on demographics, then smart employers will realize that they can find great employees in those demographics. A good portion of Quant trading is based off a similar principle. If I can model priors and variance better than my competitors, I can make money.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  It isn’t that simple. In my local talent market, big FAANGs + Microsoft-style companies have been aggressively recruiting female SWEs, creating even starker imbalances in smaller tech companies + startups. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for those companies to completely give up on finding women to hire, because that supply is limited (at least until the educational pipeline catches up). And it kind of makes sense: it will take a few more years for supply in the industry to actually increase (especially for senior talent), while companies like Google are under the spotlight now and no one really cares about that 10 developer payroll company that Google poached talent from. (Not to mention employment laws work different for companies of different sizes) To put it in trading terms, if your bigger competitors are sucking up all the supply of X, then you simply don’t worry about buying X if you can get by with Y anyways.

ga-vu 7y ago

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?

aVx1uyD5pYWW 7y ago
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/ 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.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/business/facebook-job-ads...
- ga-vu 7y ago
  Hi there, reporter!
kjs3 7y ago
Should we ignore it's still going on?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

undefined3840 7y ago

The dirty secret of hiring is that employers are always thinking about cost, but how many employees out there think of themselves as a cost to a bottom line? Not many. The most exploitable tech workers are young, single, males on H1-b visas. They will take a low salary and essentially be enslaved to their job because getting fired means getting kicked out of the country. Old workers and women are more “expensive” because they use more healthcare than young single males. We must totally disconnect employers from healthcare once and for all. We must also reform the H1-b system and stop employers from having so much leverage over vulnerable employees due to their visa status. Point is, it’s not as if employers think young men are superior talents to women or older workers, it’s that they are by far the cheapest and most exploitable. We need to remove these incentives (or disincentives) that distort the hiring process and allow these discriminatory behaviors to bubble up in the first place.

thekashifmalik 7y ago
My man! Best analysis I've seen. I'm familiar with the H1B situation and you are very much spot on. Young dudes will work hard, keep their head down and take a terrible salary as long as there is the promise of citizenship at the end of the tunnel.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
Older workers will still demand to be paid more than younger workers, since they have more experience.
- kjs3 7y ago
  Well....they don't, per se, demand it. They are worth it because they have more experience. The issue is that even the ones who will accept less than their worth aren't considered because of various biases that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job.
geebee 7y ago
On a related note, you've nailed a big problem I have with encouraging women to go into IT. How I can I enthusiastically recommend this field for women when I have reservations about recommending it to anyone? The reasons I'd be hesitant to encourage my daughter to go into IT are largely the same reasons I'd be hesitant to encourage it for my son And the remaining reasons specific only to a woman may be present in every field, perhaps to a greater extent. People compare nursing to software development, and by national numbers, yes, software pays more. But out here in San Francisco, ground zero for the "shortage" of software engineers (so grave that apparently it imperils the entire US economy and national security), an application developer, until very recently (like, last couple of years, according to BLS stats), earned less than a registered nurse. Here are the latest numbers. Software developer (San Francisco): ~147k/yr https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope... Registered nurse (San Francisco): ~140k/yr https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/... The data is a bit hard to parse, because here are specialties of programmer and nurse that pay more, and less, than these numbers (nurse anesthetist, for example, earn much more). There are variable pay issues to consider - tech workers may have options, but then again, nurses who work for government or university hospitals often have very good pension packages (the kind that were once commonplace but are now extinct in the private sector). And UCSF fired a bunch of IT workers after telling them to train their H1B replacements, try that on the nurse's union (seriously, see what happens). I think that things like maternity leave are probably better in nursing as well. In any case, while it isn't clear that nursing is necessarily a better field, it is absolutely not clear, in any way, that it's a worse choice from a financial and career/job stability. Tech goes through this on a pretty regular cycle. The CEOs ask the market what it costs to get talented people who would like to do something meaningful with their life what kind of salary they'd need to agree to work on photo sharing apps in a giant open office in a place where a crappy 2 br house runs well above a million. It turns out people with options kinda prefer other options, like, say becoming a nurse practitioner. The market answers, the CEOs don't like it, so they have the government ask again on their behalf. The government responds by granting these CEOs and their HR departments control over a shadow immigration system, where they get to decide who does and doesn't get to live in the uS and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain here. Those conditions, it turns out often involve being a developer in the valley - because that's what the country needs, right? Meanwhile, the people with the right to choose a career path consistent with their interests, life ambitions, and financial needs (what we call the "free folk", those who either inherited citizenship at birth, have a relative here, purchased it through various investments, or earned it through 7-10 years of employment at a tech company that sponsors and controls their green card application) often decide that they'd rather do something else. I'm hardly going to discourage someone with free choice from choosing an different option, especially when so many of those other options provide meaningful and fulfilling work at reasonable salaries (and don't involve tech interview tests or open offices).

foobar1962 7y ago

Posting a job on social media -- and not dedicated job sites -- is already reducing the number of people likely to see the listing. A lot of people don't use social media. I did a digital marketing course and have met a few digital marketers. When asked if they use social media themselves, most if not all answer "oh GOD no."

underwater 7y ago
You can choose whether to use social media or not. You can't choose your gender.

manigandham 7y ago

The simple question is: Does everyone have an equal opportunity to this position or not? If you can't even see the ads then the answer is no, and so it's a violation. If there were different ads for different groups but everyone still had the opportunity to see, apply and acquire the position then it's fair game. Perhaps Facebook could improve job ads to allow for more specific targeting but always have a fallback ad in that campaign for any non-targeted users. This would help employers without excluding anyone.

gnicholas 7y ago
> The simple question is: Does everyone have an equal opportunity to this position or not? If you can't even see the ads then the answer is no, and so it's a violation. Do these cases involve advertising positions that are not listed elsewhere? Because obviously no company can afford to reach everyone who might be interested in a position. I would agree that selective advertising would be much more of a problem if the positions are not listed on employers' websites.
- manigandham 7y ago
  I'm not sure if there is a perfect answer there. It might be best to scope it down to a certain medium and channel and say that all users on that channel have the ability to either see the ad or browse a directory of all listings. If Facebook also had a jobs board that anyone can search and find ads where employers aren't paying for impressions then I think that would offset a targeted campaign to select groups.
WomanCanCode 7y ago
I agree. As a female software developer, I would like to see those ads so I can get better jobs. If I don't even see the ads, then I would not even know about opportunity. Without opportunity, I cannot really progress. If only men see the ads, apply jobs and get interviews, then the employers may think that they shouldn't advertise to women. This is just circular thinking.
- 7y ago

gnicholas 7y ago

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 I don't know what goes into the algorithm of creating lookalike audiences — for example, how important gender is versus interests.

throwawayjava 7y ago
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.
- gnicholas 7y ago
  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
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    Disparate impact (without valid justification) and discriminatory intent are both illegal.
shkkmo 7y ago
Yes, easily because only thing that is necessary (in the US) is the disparate effect of your employment policies (edit: and the relevancy of those policies to the position being filled): > The laws enforced by EEOC prohibit an employer or other covered entity from using neutral employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative effect on applicants or employees of a particular race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), or national origin, or on an individual with a disability or class of individuals with disabilities, if the polices or practices at issue are not job-related and necessary to the operation of the business. [0] [0] https://www.eeoc.gov//laws/practices/ https://www.eeoc.gov//laws/practices/

dlphn___xyz 7y ago

this doesnt seem like a bad thing imo - tech has always favors young applicants

kjs3 7y ago
You're going to age too. Don't wait until employers say "screw you" before you care.

lonelappde 7y ago

Facebook studies every details of its users lives, so why on Earth is targeting job are by gender an effective choice? Is all that other behavioral data useless for targeting? Is personalized advertising a fraudulent industry?

WomanCanCode 7y ago

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

mysterydip 7y ago
To me that's a good thing and a reason to work less in the office. Your brain is still working on the problem while you're out doing other things. I've had multiple occasions where I didn't find the solution to an issue while staring at the screen, but rather that evening or the next morning while at home.
dlp211 7y ago
Stop giving your employer free labor.

slics 7y ago

From the comments below on testing one’s experience, I don’t think that there is a way to actually test one’s soft skill experience, and if they are the right candidate for the job, other than leveraging the networking aspect for recommending a candidate for a job. One important requirement for a senior executive job these days is their Soft Skills. If you can find a way to measure that, well you have solved a major issue.

aussieguy1234 7y ago

Not just Facebook, but any targeted advertising platform that can target based on demographic could do this. Its not the first example of unethical behaviour using this technology. Alcohol gets targeted to Alcholics, Gambling gets targets to problem gamblers. Targeted advertising for certain purposes should be illegal, including employment ads, alcohol ads, gambing ads and any kind of political ad. There's just too many ways it can go wrong with these kinds of ads.

erichocean 7y ago
Or we could outright ban advertising everywhere, for any reason, full stop.
- dschuetz 7y ago
  Well. That's not as easy as you think. Most companies believe that without ads they'd lose to competition.
  - jackvalentine 7y ago
    So their only differentiator is they advertise and their competitors don’t?
    - cwkoss 7y ago
      sounds like brands that society would he healthier without
- greggman2 7y ago
  Interesting. You just advertised an idea. That should be banned?
  - basq 7y ago
    Think it's safe to assume gp meant paid advertising.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rjf72 7y ago

I understand the reason some people are upset with this, but one issue I find interesting is that this is exactly how 'fair' advertising works, but implicitly. For instance if I advertise a position in, as some random example, Popular Mechanics, I'm going to get an extremely biased sample. And I'm putting my position there specifically because I want to appeal to that demographic. This is also why, for instance, in times past if you stayed at home and watched broadcast television there would be a disproportionate number of ads for things such as tampons, diapers (adult and child alike), and job injury lawyers. It was targeting the demographic watching television at that time. Perhaps one fair solution here would be an opt-in demographic profile override. What a mouth full. What I mean is that if you want, you can require Facebook to set your demographics to whatever you like. In other words, imagine you're a woman and you want to be shown ads targeting men, well you can opt-in to require your account profile to be a hit for man or woman. The curious thing is that I imagine almost nobody would actually choose to opt-in there. It'd probably be more used as a protest tool to destroy the value of advertising (by large numbers of people opting into everything), than a tool to get more ads you're interested in. Can't say I'm particularly upset by that outcome though.

peteretep 7y ago

> 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 headline should be the second half of it, which is: "After two years the Federal Government confirms demographic advertising of jobs is illegal"

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
Seems pointless to me. What are they gonna do, hire those folks they meant to exclude anyway when they show up?
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  While we're at it: why bother with any sort of anti-discrimination effort? Haters' gonna hate after all. /s
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    There is a difference between accepting discrimination, or trying to enforce antidiscrimination. Make such things open, talk and discuss about it, yes! But when you discriminate to counter discrimination for example, than I believe something went wrong.
- quietbritishjim 7y ago
  It depends. If the goal was to exclude women or old people no matter how qualified they are then you're right, they could just be excluded at a later stage. But if goal was to save money or reach more relevant people based on the assumption that there are fewer old people and women with necessary qualifications then they actually might hire them once they've applied. Now I think about it, even in the first case it could make a difference. Rejecting an application from a real individual based on prejudice might be harder to do, due to a stronger feeling of wrongness, than just unchecking a box labelled "female".

robk 7y ago

Why would employers not target women?

AdrianB1 7y ago
At the steel mill where several of my cousins worked there was never, ever a female applicant for positions on the factory floor, in 50 years. Why pay for adds that nobody will care for? Same for kindergartens in my country, there is no male care taker (not sure what is the right name, it is not a teaching position) in the entire country. Why advertise it to men? If you want to hire junior developers, for example, why pay adds to people over 50 years old? Chances they will never apply for a junior position in the field.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cryptozeus 7y ago
Biases

stakhanov 7y ago

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?

Dude2029 7y ago
Because it's the current year and men never complain.
adrianN 7y ago
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.
- abbasaamer 7y ago
  That's a poor comparison and I think most people understand that, even if the current environment discourages them from admitting it.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Why do you think that it's a poor comparison?
    - GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago
      there are more homeless men than women. So that's like targeting men to give free food and shelter because more men need it, which wouldn't happen.
      - ptah 7y ago
        i think you are trying to stretch the metaphor too far

cryptozeus 7y ago

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.

unionpivo 7y ago
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.
- repolfx 7y ago
  Don't even look away. Just accept that people do differ by birth characteristics and that there are often legitimate reasons to discriminate based on those factors. There's no shame in that. Look at firefighters. To get a female firefighter in New York they had to lower the strength tests. Those tests were calibrated to be able to carry people out of a burning building. Do you really want a 'process' that one tiny step at a time leads to people eventually burning to death because their rescuer was a tiny 5ft girl who couldn't lift them? https://nypost.com/2015/05/03/woman-to-become-ny-firefighter-despite-failing-crucial-fitness-test/ https://nypost.com/2015/05/03/woman-to-become-ny-firefighter... Or more prosaically, do you think men should be lingerie models? Or people too old to run should be hired to take care of very young children?
  - unionpivo 7y ago
    I Disagree with you on the word "often". There are far many jobs where physical body doesn't matter (and even there, you wont accept fat young guy either, so you might as well just list what do you expect candidate to be able to preform), than those that do. Now lets look at a story in question: > In the latest rulings, the EEOC cited four companies for age discrimination: > Capital One, Edwards Jones, Enterprise Holdings and DriveTime Automotive Group. > Three companies were cited for discrimination by both age and gender: Nebraska Furniture Mart, > Renewal by Andersen LLC and Sandhills Publishing Company. No firefighters, no lingerie models ( I thought there were male underwear models). As far as who do I expect to become firefighter ? Anyone who can do the job. If it means only males can do the job (I have no idea hoe true that is), I am fine with that exception. But if there is a woman who can lift just as much as average firefighter, and want to do the job, why would you prevent her from doing it ?

sdfmmkmsdfmk 7y ago

Why force businesses to waste money on advertising to and interviewing people they don't want to hire? At the end of the day, some person will get a job. Why is it better if a woman or old person gets the job? Enforcing diversity hiring practices is not creating more jobs for anyone (except diversity advisors, granted). On the contrary, it increases the cost of doing business, which is likely to reduce demand for employees.

ptah 7y ago
most studies show that diversity leads to increased productivity and innovation. it actually reduces the cost of doing business significantly. this is the only reason big corporates are doing it as they are purely driven by their bottom line

donmatito 7y ago

I came to read "and what about the men? Men are discriminated against too", was not disappointed

fffjdtcsebj 7y ago

Last year my main competitor went on a diversity hire drive. After hiring a bunch they tried to fire one of them due to poor performance. It ended up as a legal battle that is still ongoing. A number of the the other diversity hires got the message that they were now unfirable and decided to start slacking off as well. Now work there is pretty much frozen and they're bleeding customers. Im told they're 6 months away from mass layoffs. This company dominated my industry. I always planned on the taillight following strategy where you follow a leading company and wait for them to screw up. I'm now happily taking full advantage of their situation. I actually have a way more 'diverse' staff. I offshored the work (and myself) to a non-white country where for a weird historical reason this work was mostly done by women. The main difference is that they're not a protected class here so I don't have to worry about lawsuits. The most lucrative customers will only buy American so once my competitor goes under I'll open up a US office which will mean exposure to US laws but by that stage I'll be ready to package the company off and sell it to someone else to worry about.

teachrdan 7y ago
I want to apply the principal of generosity here, but the fact that your post perfectly illustrates the alleged perils of hiring non-white or Asian men--from a new account no less!--makes me wonder if anything resembling this story ever happened. Then again, everything in your narrative is so vague it's literally impossible to disprove.
- astura 7y ago
  Do people really know such detailed information of the HR issues of their competitors? Plus it just sounds like a shit post - "You can't hire black people, they'll just slack off and sue you when you fire them."

Eucatastrophe 7y ago

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.