Facebook Is Letting Job Advertisers Target Only Men
propublica.org
propublica.org
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)?
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-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.
The Disparate Treatment and Disparate Impact doctrines are diametrically opposed, yet both can lead to lawsuits. When a company gets big enough, it's going to start running into discrimination lawsuits no matter what they do. There are things they can do to offset the damages (diversity training, diversity department, certain types of donations), but the end result can still be settlements in the tens of millions of dollars.
If you have a real estate office and somebody walks in, you might offer them a cup of coffee. If another person walks in later and you forget to offer it to them, and that person is part of a protected class...you've just violated equal housing.
This is why a lot of real estate offices will put out drinks, snacks and coffee with a "help yourself" sign now.
Well over half of the course was basically "how not to get sued."
Laws like these are not criminal laws, and are not meant to be enforced if by that you mean policed. It's up to someone to file a lawsuit, if they think the law is on their side. Then a judge will have to rule whether or not the law applies in that particular case, and in doing so they may set a precedent which will influence how later cases will be judged.
And following that further along, in this way, I can see a pretty straightforward method of declaring any job advertising as discriminatory under that decision
You may think so, but this is why we have judges. Just because you can make and argument, it doesn't mean that argument will be persuasive to a judge. You may further think that this means that the outcome of a trial is arbitrary, and you would be right in the sense that law is not an exact science, and the result of a verdict can be difficult to predict if the evidence is weak and/or there is no precedent. But you would also be wrong in the sense that each verdict rendered helps to set precedent, and judges (and lawyers) always look to see what precedent has been set, both when it comes to how to interpret the law, but also when it comes to establishing what counts and doesn't count as evidence.
Disclaimer: IANAL. I'm not even American.
It's basically the civil equivalent of an actively enforced law nobody can possibly comply with at all times that gives the cops the power to harass whoever they want whenever they want (e.g. the 55mph speed limit on I95 in the Boston area) except instead of empowering cops to harass people on flimsy pretext they're empowering plantiffs to harass companies on flimsy pretext.
Laws and precedents (in the case of civil litigation) that well meaning parties can't possibly comply with are bad.
This is one of the reasons that the "loser pays" approach to the cost of litigation used in much of the rest of world would not work well in the US. We use private civil lawsuits to enforce things that would be enforced by government agencies in much of the rest of the world, so it is important that individuals can bring lawsuits against much bigger, much better funded entities without having to worry about getting wiped out financially if they lose.
That's worse, because then it shifts the burden of en^W^W policing onto those who actually want to go through the time and expense of a lawsuit, so only the most egregious abuses against the most powerful people will ever see judicial oversight, providing an extremely noisy signal that never provides reliable guidance, esp when (as parent notes) huge classes of activity are violating the ostensible "disparate impact" criteria but never prosecuted.
> But you would also be wrong in the sense that each verdict rendered helps to set precedent,
But those verdicts don't help when the set of cases going to trial is skewed as above. The only real signal it sends is "hey, don't do it in a way that might get noticed by someone who actually matters".
I think the precedent is the opposite. Companies and governments in the US do this all of the time without legal risk.
> And following that further along, in this way, I can see a pretty straightforward method of declaring any job advertising as discriminatory under that decision.
Perhaps a bit of a stretch here. Companies and governments will continue to advertise jobs
> So in that way it's not used to fight discrimination, but instead becomes yet one more way to fight the oldest battle in history: The battle to consolidate and preserve the power of existing institutions of control and weaken the influence of competition and punish outsiders.
This sounds like good old competition to me. Why would an established player not weaken competition with pricing or product value?
It's pretty crazy. They are legal adults. They vote. They serve on juries. These are the people that fight america's wars and actually risk their lives but at home large companies are discriminating against them in an rapidly expanding sphere of things.
Actually you can by lying to Facebook. I have been doing this for a long time and the bullshit ads I get are kind of amusing.
Is why we have species that impersonate other species, or that have camouflage patterning.
"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
Ok, I'm not deeply informed on Disparate Impact, but as you just described it, as intent doesn't matter, if your "job listing targeting Python developers" skews male and doesn't pass the 80% test, you're still discriminating & liable right?
You make a lot of interesting points and its a difficult problem, for sure, but I think this is a bit of a straw man. Even for company that explicitly intended to discriminate by hiring only men for a position could avoid the vast majority of what you wrote here by posting the position on their company jobs website and just only seriously considering applicants with male names. Trivial, even.
Its also possible that a company could be using gender targeting in advertising specifically to _mitigate_ the tendency for certain roles to have gender-skewed candidates, by targeting women on Facebook for python roles because their applicants through the passive/non-targeted listing sites skew male as an example.
I can't say one way or the other if that's what Uber did, but its impossible to look at the activity on one platform and somehow extrapolate that to the entire company's hiring strategy.
(And for anyone who doesn't know much about digital advertising, despite all of the crazy complexities, all of these systems are basically trying to maximize displays toward people who are going to respond to the ad and eliminate displays to people who won't. The definition of a response at the simplest is a click, but at the most complex is a lead, app install, purchase over a certain order size, etc. In many cases even the deepest pocketed brand advertisers will not be able to out-bid a highly optimized ad campaign for specific inventory.)
On the other side of the internet advertising pie you have Google (excluding Indeed and LinkedIn because I know only a little about their platforms.) An advertiser is going to bid on "driver jobs" or whatever, and Google is going to do the rest. Way back when, before Google collected user demographics, the ad is going to show just for the people who searched it. I'm going to take a guess that some job keywords split 50/50 while others skew heavily toward certain genders or age groups (e.g. 0 females over 65 are searching for manual labor jobs.) With Google's demographic data and machine learning based targeting, what is really going on today, in 2018, is a mystery to me. I would assume that these algorithms are not demographically neutral. They probably learn that males respond more to driving ads. Almost certainly on the display side of things (which Google's less sophisticated ad buyers might not realize they are purchasing) the ads are going to start skewing toward certain demographics.
Solely based on the way Facebook's platform works, I would question if it is ok for any advertiser to place ads on Facebook's platform as Facebook can place the blame on the advertiser even though it is ultimately a consequence of how their system is designed. On Google's side, the same discrimination is likely happening but the advertiser can probably blame Google.
At the end of the day, larger questions persist. How much money should employers be spending on letting employees know that they have a paying job available to them? And, is it ok that job opportunities, which may be superior, and being buried by those that have deeper pocketed employers?
Because of Google's semi-recent launch and expansion of Google Jobs results, which almost certainly will end up heavily monetized, I think these are very important questions.
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.
The multiple ads question is interesting though, and might very well be a valid defense, since they then are advertising to both.
Different audience segments may want different things from a job. For example, an increasing number of workplaces are offering paid paternity leave. Maybe that's something you want to specifically mention to men.
1) Is making a little economy really more important than giving equal opportunity ? 2) What makes you think you, or the person that designed the ad, knows best what might women (or any other group that might be discriminated against with similar practices) are interested in?
And that, especially when advertising for a job! Women may not be particularly "excited" by the message that conveys the ad, but they might be looking for a job all the same.
All your points sound the same to me, it comes down to : "women like cooking, teamwork and are not interested in being trucker, policemen or technologists, and men like sports and being stong and don't want to be a hairdresser or a nurse" now let's apply these hard facts to cut the costs when advertising for jobs. That way we make sure our stereotypes stay true, and it doesn't matter if it's unfair, it's just how are things. And I don't think I can change your strongly stereotypical view of gender in this comment alone, but I'm telling you : that can change, and women want that to change, because they want equal pay, and equal pay also means equal opportunity to high paying jobs.
Employment opportunity is not the ideal topic to split hair, let's just not target ads at one gender.
Knowing what a type of person wants on the average is not discrimination.
What this actually is going to do is target "people interested in typically male interests". That is going to end up including men, women and trans men. More importantly, the hit rate of gender-targeted ad spend trends towards 50% regardless of gender. It is not an effective tactic.
This is totally overblown.
/signed someone who used to be a digital advertiser in the legal space with a yearly budgeted spend north of $100 million.
Facebook absolutely has an option to show your advert to a specific gender, though
> Gender. Target ads to women, men or people of all genders.
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/717368264947302?helpr...
So what's happening after that point to stop you from restricting in this way? I've never created an avert like this.
When I say the hit rate of ads targeting women is 50%, I mean that of the number of people who see ads that were targeted at women, only 50% of them were women. Targeting men works a little bit more consistently, by usually about 10%, but I don't know why.
That's industry-wide. I don't know if Facebook does better or not, but I have no reason to think so. Even if they did, it probably doesn't matter that much.
Is this normal? Did it actually work? I always wondered on the ROI of ads. It must be high if spending $100 million has no one but me replying...
Depending on the campaign/type of spend, digital advertising tends to convert leads in a range somewhere between 0.02% and 10%. 10% is extraordinarily good. Lead quality largely depends on the type of case, but ROI on the good cases is anywhere from low 5/6-digit auto injury cases which require little effort from a lawyer to hundred-million and even billion dollar judgements/settlements.
> "A recipient’s express or admitted use of a classification based on race, color, or national origin establishes intent without regard to the decision-makers’ animus or ultimate objective. Such classifications demonstrate a discriminatory purpose as a matter of law. See Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 904–05 (1995); see also Wittmer v. Peters, 904 F. Supp. 845, 849–50 (C.D. Ill. 1995), aff’d, 87 F.3d 916 (7th Cir. 1996). “Put another way, direct evidence of intent is ‘supplied by the policy itself.’” Hassan v. City of New York, 804 F.3d. 277, 295 (3d Cir. 2015) (quoting Massarsky v. Gen. Motors Corp., 706 F.2d 111, 128 (3d Cir.1983) (Sloviter, J., dissenting)).
Where a plaintiff demonstrates, or an agency determines, that a challenged policy overtly and expressly singles out a protected group for disparate treatment, “a plaintiff need not prove the malice or discriminatory animus of a defendant ….” Bangerter v. Orem City Corp., 46 F.3d 1491, 1501 (10th Cir. 1995); see also Ferrill v. Parker Grp., Inc., 168 F.3d 468, 473 n.7 (11th Cir. 1999) (“[I]ll will, enmity, or hostility are not prerequisites of intentional discrimination.”). Rather, the focus is on the “explicit terms of the discrimination,” Int’l Union, United Auto. Aerospace & Agric. Implement Workers of Am. v. Johnson Controls, Inc., 499 U.S. 187, 199 (1991); that is, how the recipient’s actions specifically deprived or otherwise adversely affected the individual or individuals of access to a federally funded program or benefit. Even benign motivations for racial classifications are presumptively invalid and trigger strict scrutiny in Equal Protection Clause and Title VI cases. Adarand, 515 U.S. at 223–24 (1995); Grutter, 539 U.S. at 326" [1]
Does that just mean "budget"?
At least that's my recollection, though I've been out of ads for like a couple years now.
Right now, Google thinks I'm a 65yo+ woman with high income. When I turn off my ad blocker (rarely!), I see ads related to retirement, AARP, etc.
Facebook is not a single-gender platform.
Saying that "FB is not a single gender platform" is like saying that "Higher education is not a single gender platform".
How is this not seen as a good thing, not to be subjected to mind manipulation?
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.
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.
This would put an end to self-service ad posting.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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..." )
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 ?
Facebook had made an error here, as has Uber and this is a pretty straightforward violation.
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.
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_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.
I wonder what those numbers look like: What percentage of job advertisers only target women?
If I'm spending ad dollars, why would I not choose the most effective form of advertising for me?
That's not to say they're not hiring women. In which case it'd be more dubious.
Last week in the Bay Area I heard a TSA radio advertisement, in which they said, 'women and people of color strongly encouraged to apply.' Imagine the outrage if they had said 'white men strongly encouraged to apply'?
All the qualification based on immutable characteristics, versus actual ability to do the job, makes me feel very uneasy.
You know the job, you know what it entails and you know what works behaviorally and physically. There are differences between genders. That's okay.
I do think it's sexist to not hire a qualified women for the job because she's a women ( esp. in the garbage collector scenario). Like you hate women or something and you don't hire them ( funny story I heard a women on the sidewalk casually say she hated men. Never heard a man say that... ) The same for the flipside.
I do think it's a sexist double standard to say it's not okay to target men for a job and not mention anything about the flipside: it's okay to only target women.
In the end the net result of targeting only men is the same as refusing to hire women, it denies otherwise qualified women opportunities that they are deserving of.
That this has a cost is understood by those who wrote the law, they decided those costs are worth it.
It's one thing to target a gender in your advertisement. It's another to deny someone a job based on their gender.
For sure. But you're not hiring a sex, you're hiring a person and individuals can match requirements for almost all types of position regardless of sex.
I think there will certainly be some issues if it becomes a trend though. I mean, most programmers are men, most doctors are women and if you target your adds based on that, you’ll only further increase the current norms.
Frankly targeting sex makes little sense for most jobs, doesn’t it? It’s be more reasonable to target interests, qualifications, education and current job status. I mean, Facebook knows what job and car you have, it might even know how much you drive, wouldn’t it make sense for Uber to target that instead of sex? But maybe they combine it all.
The inclusion of 'women and people of color strongly encouraged to apply' is actually walking a fine legal line when you go by the word of the law, and is only accepted as it is encouraging what are more-often the discriminated-against groups within the protected classes. It follows the sprite of the law, which is to protect the discriminated-against groups within the protected classes.
And, as a business owner, please tell me why it would not be in my best interest to hire the best person for the job?
It is in your best interest to hire the best person for the job, but if you determine who is "best" based on inclusion or exclusion from a protected class then you are illegally discriminating (except for in some specific cases such as the sex and race of actors, and where disabilities can not be reasonably accommodated for).
[0] https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=97&page=...
To put a slightly different spin on things, in the US young black men are more likely to be perpratrators of crime[0], so should police spend more time investigating young black men over other demographics?
[0] whether this is due to racial prejudice or other systemic matters doesn't matter.
Say you divide a group of candidates into evenly split groups based on something. Gender, age, race - your pick. You'd end up with an uneven split even if your entire pool has the same qualification level and you let someone hire from it "by merit". And I don't mean it'll be random, there will be a clear distribution given enough samples.
How else do you suggest we solve this issue besides affirmative action?
Old people are bad? I don't have issues? Because I'm a particular color and ethnicity you've attached to me?
My comment is about education that is actual education. For example, let's teach kids math in a form that has worked for centuries. Not this new common core stuff. Let's teach students a more complete history, versus the cartoonish narrative that has produced these brainwashed masses. And the current cultural narrative is part of that problem. Check out Thomas Sowell or Camille Paglia. They have some ideas on education based in empirical evidence, not based on what sounds good.
And how has there not been progress? If you look at what the media says I can understand that impression. But walk around a city and you'll see people of all colors, ethnicities, wearing suits working in offices, etc.
I live in a world where, if you put your mind to it and work hard, you can get closer to where you want to be. No matter who you are. And no matter where you came from.
I don't walk around the world putting people in victim/oppressor categories based on someone's outward appearance. That's dark. And to me, more a reflection on the viewer than the actual people they claim to know which category they fit in.
It is patent discrimination to evaluate government contracts from certain groups as having lower costs, simply because the business owners come from certain groups. That is discrimination, and it has nothing to do with child labor laws.
Because it's illegal? Advertising jobs only to white men hurts society. A modern democracy understands that freedom loving people need access to jobs. So yeah, you are prevented from infringing on others' freedoms.
Righto.
If the article's title was "Facebook is letting job advertisers target only women" or "Facebook is letting job advertisers target only people in their ideal demographic", I wonder if the discussion would be any different here.
If targeted job advertisement based on gender is illegal then let make that the new norm. The extreme end on both side of the so called gender war will be against it and hopefully the majority in the middle will be in favor of it. I strongly doubt however that the law can currently be used to push this since so much of out reach programs have been using targeted job advertisement.
There are exceptions in the law for when the person's sex genuinely matters. If you're hiring male models/dancers/actors/medical test subjects, for instance, then you're exempted. As far as I could see in my skim-read of the article, it makes no mention of such cases.
Leaving aside judgement of the merits of such policy, this is basically already the case in real estate post Fair Housing legislation.
Among other things advertisements for housing, to the extent they include human models, must show models that proportionally represent the population of the community, not the population of the desired buyers.
In some ways this is similar to how an employer cannot ask a potential employee if she is pregnant. Allowing the question might maximise the company's profit but would be considered unfair to women.
If you do something illegal because your users asked you to, it's still illegal.
The article is pretty clear that publishing the ads is illegal.
An example of safe harbor protection would be something like a user uploading a copyrighted song without a site's knowledge. If the site did not know about it, did not benefit from it financially, and takes it down when they are told about it, safe harbor protections would probably apply.
In contrast, Facebook knows the content and targeting options of every ad that they publish, and makes money from the ads.
You might want to look at USC Section 230 [1] which says "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
[0] http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/512.html [1] http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/47/230.html
prohibit acts are allowed, and they are dealt with by punishing the wrong doers.
Turning a company's automated system into a judge of legal and illegal action just seems like a bad idea in the long run.
Though, it is seemingly a growing trend, I don't feel it will result in a improved world in the end.
But Facebook is somehow how different? Why?
Oh right their business model doesn't work if they have to pay the costs associated with following government regulations.
I'm not feeling sympathetic.
I'm asking, are we wanting facebook to do it because it's ethical? Or are we wanting to legally require them to?
It's up to Facebook to take whatever internal steps they deem necessary to prevent that from happening. The government doesn't need to decide what steps need to be taken -- it only needs to care about the outcome.
The local newspaper has a self service portal for classifieds. I don’t know about thier job ads, but they review their ads for rentals for violations of the Fair Housing Act.
I think the issue arises when you’re using an advertisement to look for employees.
Also some recruiter are explicitely trying to correct a gender imbalance and are therefore actively seeking female candidates. Does that become unethical to advertise to women?
Um, the cleaner is usually coming in when the locker room is empty so sex doesn't matter.
The real problem here is that some people will always cry and rant, regardless of the situation:
- Job ad for women? Sexist! We don't need you to tell us what to do.
- Job ad for men? Sexist! We can do that to!
- Job ad for both? Sexist! You should prioritize women, we are a minority.
There are only a handful of fields where women dominate.
I was curious if I could find some figures, so I did a quick Google search. While I can't vouch for the data used in this article, it seems your statement is incorrect, and quite strongly so
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...
It draws data from the U.S. Department of Labor
A better approach would be to get the full counts of the positions, but that requires more work than the results are probably worth.
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2011-title29-vol4/xml/CFR-...
It is a violation of title VII for a help-wanted advertisement to indicate a preference, limitation, specification, or discrimination based on sex unless sex is a bona fide occupational qualification for the particular job involved. The placement of an advertisement in columns classified by publishers on the basis of sex, such as columns headed “Male” or “Female,” will be considered an expression of a preference, limitation, specification, or discrimination based on sex."
Seems to me like they're legally in the clear, as long as the ad itself doesn't contain any indication. Same as only advertising in a publication whose readers are 99% male - Google's gender metrics aren't even that precise.
The placement of an advertisement in columns classified by publishers on the basis of sex, such as columns headed “Male” or “Female,” will be considered an expression of a preference, limitation, specification, or discrimination based on sex.
Facebook publishes the ad, and their target gender option surely falls in under "column classification".
Of course, it's also the outcome I'd expect, but biased application of the law is a separate issue.
Even if there is no such categorization, it’s not a difficult NLP challenge to detect that the content of an ad is for job hiring, or to know that the advertiser is based in the U.S. FB could implement a warning/reminder dialog similar to how GMail tells you that you haven’t actually included an attachment yet.
Society tells you: you should get a career and climb up the social ladder. Don't worry, every one has the same chances. But then the same society goes around your back and only tells your male friends that there may be an opportunity here or there? wtf?
If I was a female developer, or a male nurse, I'd be fucking furious to know that this was happening.
There are definitely some jobs that require the person to be male or female, or white, or jewish, or old, whatever. But that's not the norm. Whether or not it is a Facebook duty to remove the box is debatable, but if you are a recruiter and you tick the male box, you're clearly open to lawsuits.
Whilst targeting individual groups can certainly lead to inequalities there is the problem of tailoring ads to an audience. One way a company may wish to make their ads more appealing is by showing relatable people in adverts.
If a company is running two variations of the same job advert, one featuring women and one featuring men, distributing coverage across the two variations evenly, then is there still an issue? I would argue not, yet introducing a non-gender targeting rule would make this impossible to do and could in fact have the opposite affect to what was desired by the regulation.
Even in jobs, you would be walking a very fine line if an obviously pregnant woman walked in and you started mentioning that the place you work is great for mothers.
Crossing the line would be “This job requires a lot of travel,are you sure you could handle it with a newborn?”
I really don't see how the companies placing the ads, aren't going to get hammered for it.
But Facebook is doing nothing illegal, unless the ads, were placed for jobs with Facebook.
Just as newspaper/radio/tv aren't required not to post job adverts that violate the EEOC's rules.
For clarity, According to the EEOC (https://www1.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm?renderforprin...)
Recruitment
It is also illegal for an employer to recruit new employees in a way that discriminates against them because of their race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.
For example, an employer's reliance on word-of-mouth recruitment by its mostly Hispanic work force may violate the law if the result is that almost all new hires are Hispanic.
I think the key here is may. Nothing I have read seems to indicate that targeting men only violates the EEOC rules. The rule only seems to be if the result is almost all new hires are X.
What if we had a good pool of men working, and the company was a perfect example of diversity but found that it lacked women needed for a spot to keep their 50/50 ratio. Now let's say they had a lot of qualified men candidates already lined up. Why should the be forced to put ads out for men they know they won't hire because the next 5 hires are going to be women to keep their diversity ratio?
Side note (off topic), I was unaware of the EEOC rules on this sort of thing and am a bit shocked knowing that on HN and various places on the internet I have seen people promoting jobs that flat out say "POC or Woman applicants will only be considered". It Think Evergreen and UCLA recently had job postings with this type of wording recently. How is that not a EOC violation?
> thefacebook.com allows for targeted advertisement on the basis of any (or a combination of) the following parameters:
> College/University, Sexual Orientation, Degree Type, Zip Code, Concentration, Dating interests, Courses taken, Personal Interests, Class Year, Clubs and Jobs, House/Dormitory, Political Bent, Age, Number of friends, Gender, Site Usage.
So blatant targeted advertisement has always been part of Facebook. Lots of (now wealthy) investors and early adopters had no problem that its users were being targeted on the basis of their sexuality.
The market will go where it wants to go: Instead of explicitly targeting men, you now target people that liked WWE, Family Guy, study business school, and searched for "hackernews". Or you make the advertisement itself appealing to men (and take the small loss on an irrelevant audience).
I think the fundamental difference is null. Or maybe I am just one of the first to start to say: Hey! That's wrong!
Sometimes you don't want to be politically correct, and you go along with what things actually are, what people want and what is already working. A company is not there to solve stereotypes.
Just look at the proportion of women who can read code, or are actually interested in dealing with code. That's an issue. Same thing goes for people who do construction work, miners, the military, etc.
I totally admit that it's a cynical opinion. There's are a lot of things civilization can do to define what humans do and how they behave. Gender might have deep implications, that cannot be changed by civilization and principles of equality.
That ties into the question if companies should have a responsibility to society or just be a vehicle to make money. Opinions differ on this.
(Legality is another topic, but for the sake of this thread I propose to assume that this behavior is legal)
> “The ads themselves are illegal,” Galen Sherwin, an ACLU lawyer, said. “It’s been established for five decades.”
And that is why we have anti-descriminatory legislation.
And sometimes you'll only trust a man for the job for no good reason.
You are no Grace Hopper, and you are in no position to tell women what they can't do.
> You are no Grace Hopper, and you are in no position to tell women what they can't do.
I'm not telling anyone what to do, but it's hard to unroot stereotypes and even more difficult to go against our natural behaviors. If minorities are complexed because they're in smaller number, what is there to do?
I would like to tell young women to enroll in computer science curriculum though. Is that a good advice?
A very productive world existed without any significant marketing targeting other than geolocation and some other rough measures. Perhaps we are returning to such a state of things.
https://archive.org/stream/PopularMechanics1931#page/n9
https://archive.org/details/TheLadiesHomeJournalV48N12193112
The ads are not the same due to marketing segmentation.
For a moment there, I thought the ad by Motor Institute of America shown on the page of Popular Mechanics you linked to, was also present in your second link to the The Ladies Home Journal, albeit with a different ad copy.
1. If advertisers are targeting men the price for job ads targeting men goes up.
2. Assuming women are as good at men at the job any firm that hires women can now do so more cheaply than its competitors.
3. Firms will realize this and start hiring women by targeting them, which will push the prices towards equilibrium.
Maybe that reasoning doesn't work if the cost to target men vs women isn't that different or if companies are only spending a small amount on ads.
I wonder how many of these things we should legislate against the "bad guy" vs. just ensure the proliferation/competitiveness of the "Good guys"?
I think it's obviously false, but the article will help someone who likes to question the obvious.
If I identified as a woman, I frankly wouldn't be so worried about earning a bit less than my male counterparts, but rather about not being hired at all, because of all the legal risks associated with hiring women because of anti-discrimination laws. Nobody is getting sued for discrimination about firing some white boy.
It's possible to algorithmically bias the ad-targeting algorithms in such a way to achieve parity in whatever sensitive attribute you are concerned about, but that will come at the expense of utility of the targeting (since you will have to show it to more people who you actually don't want to target, just to achieve gender/race/age equality) - of course, that might not be so bad if your hypothesis is that the advertiser has a bad mental model of his target group to begin with and you think that Facebook should force him to make it more egalitarian.
I don't think that will happen though, Facebook might remove explicit gender targeting, but I doubt it will do much to help with biased ads since people will just use proxies for gender etc. instead.
I'd be surprised if there were no companies targeting only women for tampons, various beauty products, breast health.
Let me explain briefly. Facebook allows advertisers to pay a rate per advertisement displayed. Why shouldn't Facebook 'let' their paying customers show the ads to those they are interested in. AKA why would they pay Facebook to show their ad to people they are not interested in?
That being said - I've followed most of the discussion...and there are a lot of strong points. I just think that the title shouldn't that Facebook LET them advertise in a certain way - it should be the company that is advertising the positions only to men - although they certainly could be targeting men through that channel - and targeting women through another channel - with differing types of ads all together.
But that wouldn't get the clicks that propublica wants. Add facebook to the title and you get X more clicks.
Also, most jobs aren't even advertised. Especially the good jobs, like those at propublica. Seems like a none story to me but the problem is that the news has to make news to make money. Yes, even nonprofits have to make money.
Because not doing so is illegal in most first-world countries.
> The only thing the employer has to do is avoid criteria which touch on race, religion, gender, age or disability.
> Allen M., Esq. Attorney
Oh, and "The Pennsylvania State Police, for example, boosted a post targeted to men ..." well of course, why would they pay to advertise to females when they don't need to? You should go research the demographics of police (or visit your local donut shop): almost exclusively male, because most females don't want to do it. And if a female does want to... well, then she should go apply?
Needless generalization; in the less violent Netherlands, there's plenty of women in law enforcement, and you often see both men and women together patrolling. They are actively hired because they bring different traits to the table to de-escalate a situation.
Of course, the US is much different, much more violent, much less safe for police, and it's a self-reinforcing system.
(Except of course if X is something obvious like gender).
If I post job listings in upper-class white neighborhoods only, would that be illegal?
What if I had one ad that targeted men and another which targeted women? What if the male version was designed to be successful while the female version was designed to discourage response?
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm is a decent summary. All the examples you provide would be illegal. As the provided example states "For example, an employer's reliance on word-of-mouth recruitment by its mostly Hispanic work force may violate the law if the result is that almost all new hires are Hispanic."
- Employers will likely see better ROI on their ad-spend by creating separate ad campaigns for every gender, with copy/creatives optimized for the target demo
- Employers may see that FB ads are ineffective for a specific gender, eg. fb ads are good for finding male candidates, while other marketing channels (radio, tv ads, etc) work better for female candidates.
Given these examples, I wouldn't blame Fb for allowing gender-specific ads. The onus should be on the employer to reach out to candidates of all genders throughout their recruiting campaigns, with gender balance when you aggregate efforts across different mediums.
And I don't see anything inherently wrong with targeted towards a specific gender so long as that targeted is compensated for elsewhere in your recruiting strategy. Lots of magazines are read by more people of one sex than the other, so if you are recruiting in those magazines, I think it can make sense to make up the difference by using Facebook.
>Our survey of 91 Uber ads found just one targeting only women; three did not target a specific sex.
In the case of this tweet, I'm not sure how I feel about this, as it's clear what their goal is:
> empower and train black Computer Science students to land their first job
which seems fine. However this goal can't be achieved if a white person ends up being hired. So does the ad imply that they will only hire a black computer science student? It seems like a bit of a grey area to me.
And while I understand the article linked is about targeting only men for jobs and not for people of colour, they are similar on the basis that it is traits we have no control over.
One other point I'd like to make here, is that IF people see this as Facebook "allowing" to filter by immutable traits, in this case Twitter is essentially doing the same, by allowing these kinds of posts.
I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this.
[0]: https://twitter.com/ryancarson/status/1039624079060267008
How is it possible for a global platform cater each and every local custom?
No, the platform gives the tools to specifically filter by sex. Facebook is enabling sexual discrimination.
> every local custom
euphemism
You mean the law, the very thing that will get your in legal troubles if you break it. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to discriminate by sex when it comes to employment in US, and Facebook is an american company.
Like any ad seller, Facebook offers displaying ads based on demographics. This is a basic requirement for many advertisers, because a lot of products happen to be bought exclusively by one gender. You have a right to buy tampons, you don't have a right to be displayed advertisements for tampons.
Even if there were legal problems with those particular Uber ads, it's Uber's responsibility to follow the law, it's not Facebooks responsibility to screen every ad for possible infringements.
There's nothing illegal about what facebook is doing, although there is potential for misuse.
Genuinely curious about this, what if somebody is posting an ad for hiring labourers (brick layers, etc.)? Do they pay the cost by also targeting women? What about targeting ads for hiring beauticians at females? Is that wrong? Should the company pay the cost to also advertise to men in the off-chance that they catch one of the very few male beauticians?
To me it makes sense that advertisers, regardless of what they are advertising (job, product, service, etc.) should be able to target the demographics that they believe will achieve the desired outcome. Obviously this has few exceptions such as targeting cigarettes, alcohol, etc. at minors.
Are there any good arguments against this?
Of note: The subject of this topic seems a bit biased, why not "Facebook is letting job advertisers target specific genders?"
With demographic targeting in Google Ads, you can reach a
specific set of potential customers who are likely to be
within a particular age range, gender, parental status,
or household income. For instance, if you run a fitness
studio exclusively for women, demographic targeting could
help you avoid showing your ads to men.
> One reason you're seeing this ad is that Castore Sportswear wants to reach people who have visited their website or used one of their apps. This is based on customer information provided by Castore Sportswear.
> There may be other reasons you're seeing this ad, including that Castore Sportswear wants to reach people ages 18 and older who live in the United Kingdom. This is information based on your Facebook profile and where you've connected to the internet.
For example are actors/actresses, models, "entertainers"(hooters waitresses)
https://www.laborfinders.com/blog/is-it-ever-legal-to-only-h...
TBH it does seem a little discriminatory that a place gets to decide "all our waitresses are women", or "only women dance here", but I can see how industry's could be grandfathered in...
For example, why should somebody who loves horse-riding not get the same job offerings as somebody who loves computer-programming, in all cases?
And why can employers exclude people who are interested in pregnancy-related things, or people with dangerous hobbies like basejumping?
Can't we start a petition for a ban on targeted advertisement, so we can stop this madness altogether? It would also solve a lot of privacy related problems.
If I wanted to spread a message person to person on the street. I think I would find it odd if the government had a say in who I told the message to.
All this seems to be I'd a automated system of doing just that. So if I knew of a job at company X and I decided to tell my buddy John (cis gender male) but did not tell Jenny (cis grander female) would I be breaking any sort of rule? Or would I be forced to always find at lest one person of the opposite gender to also inform of the job?
In any case why do we care what Facebook is doing. They are simply a tool. U less you are suggesting that advertisers should not be able to do anything based off gender...
As far as Facebook's concerned, it's an advertiser picking a demographic. I bet they don't know what the ad is about!
What next? Hold AT&T culpable for providing internet to these advertisers?
If AT&T is otherwise interacting with the content (e.g. throttling or zero-rating based on it being an ad), I don't see a problem with that.
Traditionally, common carriers were protected under the premise that they didn't discriminate based on content. In this respect, I think internet carriers are putting themselves in a precarious position in not supporting net neutrality.
Once a carrier shows that it can (and does) discriminate content, what makes it different from a publisher like a newspaper?
Apple for instance would be sued into oblivion if it let anyone post a song for sale on iTunes without any vetting for copyrighted content.
Facebook should offer a "Premium Ads" program where you pay a monthly subscription to see all the ads discriminatory advertisers weren't willing to show you on their own dime!
I think it goes beyond egalitarianism, because I certainly think any female who wants to become a highly-paid programmer should be able to do so simply by building merit, without any additional barriers.
I also think that any person, male or female, has the right to decide what demographics their private company is composed of.
The extreme of this, a world where all high-paying jobs are dished out by misogynists, is definitely a problem that needs to be solved, but I don't think we are actually living in that world currently.
In particular, it's been decided that in many cases (IIRC it starts to apply if the company has more than 15 employees) any person, male or female, does not have the right to decide what demographics their private company is composed of. That's it. This is the similar to "the right to swing your fist ends at my nose"; there is an inherent conflict between ability to choose demographics in your company and the ability of all demographics to get a fair job, we can't have both. We considered that this is a problem that needs to be solved and that such restrictions are going to be (part of) a solution. We may make different choices in future, but that's the one we currently have.
It isn't really fair to compare this to that. One is a clear case of one's freedom interfering on the freedom or safety of another.
I don't think this situation is nearly that black and white.