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Comment by seneca | Hacker News Reader

> If you show me a lower paying girl job instead of a higher paying boy job, and I apply for and get the girl job, how is the company tricking me into applying for the lower paying job based on my gender not a problem to you? How as I not harmed by having a better opportunity hidden from me based on my presumed gender?

Not highlighting something to you is not the same as hiding it from you. If you want a job atypical of your demographic, you have the ability to look it up and apply for it. The fact that you might not do that does not justify forcing people to do dramatically less efficient advertising by knowingly including cohorts unlikely to engage with what they're offering.

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You seem to be suggesting that companies should be allowed to trick us so long as there is some conceivable amount of work we can do individually to uncover the trick. But because society exists for people and not companies, most of us prefer laws that stop companies from tricking us in the first place.

Advertising or not advertising jobs to people is not "tricking" them. This is a childish argument.

The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights thinks it makes perfect sense. RTFA

You do realize that the people who work there are economically incentivized to think that? In exactly the same way that Uncle Bob (who has never been a coder) is economically incentivized to talk about clean code or a salesperson is incentivized to talk about the product they are selling.

Mathematicians who are paid for their research are incentivized to prove theorems. It doesn’t make their proofs wrong.

The reason we think their proofs are correct is that other mathematicians without incentives say they are correct. Also, they show their work. By your logic, we should believe everything any salesperson says.

No, we should not believe everything that a salesperson says. I just demonstrated that „incentive“ argument does not make sense. It’s false generalization.

I don't understand where there's a trick.

Why is this not as simple as going to a job board and searching for the job that you want?

The most efficient advertising of jobs is not gender-based, it’s skill-based. Ideally you need to show your ads to candidates with exact match to job description and then some more if the pool is too small. It has nothing to do with gender.

The most efficient advertisement for a job would be to only advertise it to the single candidate who is the best fit for your profile, is looking for a job, and would accept the salary you're offering. Unfortunately intimately detailed profiles like that aren't available, so we target cohorts with the coarse details we do have such as age and gender.

And targeting specific ages and genders without having a good reason why those are required attributes for the job is going to be more of an issue when it comes to discrimination cases.

It’s the same as saying: we don’t have other opportunities to earn money, so we are going to sell drugs.

If you cannot advertise without breaking the law, do not advertise. There are plenty of other platforms which do it right.

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