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.
Basically it just says you can't actively discriminate against someone because of gender identity. Which had been the defacto law for a long time.
I suppose that's as far as Facebook's support for gender choices goes.
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.
To briefly speak of ethical and legal issues, it is highly doubtful that they would have a policy of not hiring women if women actually apply for the position (and that would most certainly be illegal). Much more likely is that whoever ran the Facebook campaign checked off that option in an dumb attempt at controlling ad campaign costs? Or maybe they ran a separate campaign to recruit women? Or maybe some other non-nefarious reason.
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.
If they don't, they're going to get their money taken anyway and a lot more savagely than a mistargeted campaign hinged on gender.
I really have to drive this point home. Selecting gender as a target on Facebook isn't actually selecting gender and everybody involved knows it. It's a much simpler way to describe a much more complex set of decisions.
1. Facebook knows my gender.
2. Facebook tell advertisers they will select/not select me based on my gender.
3. Facebook, despite knowing my gender, completely disregard that information and try and guess it with exceptionally poor results.
My entire argument is that splitting hairs over this is irrelevant because any advertisers who rely on the accuracy of that attribute are stupid and pissing money away to begin with.
> I would never use Facebook's implementation of that target (if they're going based off of what's reported to Facebook) because it would completely exclude gift purchases across genders. It would leave a ton of money on the table and be a very stupid thing to do.
But we're not talking about gifts, we're talking about jobs.
> because any advertisers who rely on the accuracy of that attribute are stupid
But why would it be inaccurate for adverts on facebook for logged in facebook users?
Hypothetical me: An HR staffer at a company with a headcount large enough to need an HR department. I get to post job listings and spend advertising dollars for those listings on Facebook.
Hypothetical my manager: Female. As ~75% of HR managers _globally_ are.
Oh yeah, hypothetical me again: Also female; depending on country and department rank, your HR staffer is 70-90% likely to be female. (It's the outlier, but in your country, new HR hires are 96% women)
The argument: Hypothetical me is going to buy ads, that my manager and probably my mostly-female coworkers can see, where I checked a box that says "only show this job listing to men". In an overwhelming social climate pushing for inclusivity and equal pay. In a work culture where these efforts are being _led_ by HR departments.
On what planet do think that this actually occurs? It is almost guaranteed that _at least_ one woman is involved in the decision making process or can audit it. Where are these companies with entirely sexist hiring processes that have significant advertising dollars to spend and where those dollars spent are going to make a significant impact in whether a man gets that job over a women in that industry and at that company?
I'll wait.
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.
Nothing in their post suggests they "went out of their way" to exclude a particular demographic. To people who do not deal with trans issues on a daily basis, it can be easy to overlook all the nuances of being trans. Calling someone out in a way that accuses deliberate motivations is borderline toxic, no matter what social issue you're voicing.
Mentioning the "going out of your way" wasn't a call-out, it was a way of justifying the existence of my comment: if he hadn't mentioned trans people at all, I wouldn't have at all bothered with my comment. Since he was explicitly considering trans people in his comment, the addition seemed appropriate, and it came more from the stereotypical engineer-y impulse of "technically this is incorrect in a non-trivial way, IMO".
This is a bizarre position for me to be in: I get that the conversation around trans issues is extraordinarily toxic, and if anything I'm usually the one dismayed by its toxicity, but please don't impute motives to me that I in no way expressed. Frankly, the way you're looking at a simple statement and assuming all sorts of ulterior motives and implicit negative feelings is a precise mirror of the perhaps more commonly-known source of this toxicity, in which attempts at understanding from those less attuned to the issues (or as you put it, "dealing with it on a daily basis") are attacked as bigotry.
I don't intend this to be insulting, but given that your comment implies a certain level of self-awareness about intellectual honesty and charity[1], I suggest that you take a look at the assumptions about me that _you_ are bringing to this conversation. The solution to reductive, toxic discourse isn't reductive toxicity in the other direction.
[1] I haven't been active on HN for a while and have been on a board with much higher standards for intelligent, intellectually honest conversation, so I suppose I was uncalibrated and should've expected the knee-jerk down vote reaction I got, regardless of the political valence of my comment. Again, going off of your comment alone, I assume you're substantially above the median in this respect.
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.
But this feels like a blunt instrument for a highly-nuanced issue. If diversity of experience is a core value at Duolingo, why not recruit everywhere and tailor the interviewing process to favor candidates from non-traditional backgrounds?
While they've achieved an important milestone, I'd be very worried about the line of thinking that led to this decision if I were a Duolingo investor. All the diversity in the world doesn't mean much if they can't find a way to keep the lights on.
Thats a misleading statement.
IMO, The main reason why they did that is because Carnegie Mellon University has more woman than men in its incoming CS classes, and Duolingo wanted an excuse to exclusively recruit from CMU (Which one of the founders teach at, and is strongly associated with).
Something like this must do ugly things to one's mind and one's perception of self-worth.
And in what way is this special treatment?
Companies use a variety of different metrics by which to determine which schools they should recruit from. "We want to increase our diversity" is a reasonable metric to use, and "recruit from colleges with an above-average percentage of people in a minority group we've chosen to view as important" is a reasonable way to accomplish that.
I shouldn't have to point this out, but diversity is more than just a buzzword. Increasing diversity on the development side improves the final product, for a variety of reasons.
It only be an apt analogy to the Universities if Facebook were some single-gender social network. Or if an all-gender University let you only recruit one gender.
But in general, there are classes of ads that you just can't target based on certain classes, period. Even if you hypothetically might have the ability to target a counterbalancing ad somewhere else. Facebook repeatedly has been in hot water over this, and both they and the people using their ad platform to do this stuff need to get more than a slap on the wrist, in order to deter others from trying the same in the future.
I literally take issue with it, as in I don't think it is right. I said nothing about the implications and I certainly don't think someone should be jailed for poor recruiting practices.
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".
You're missing their point about using limits on the market supply to discriminate for a job - i.e. even if that job is "open to all", but you've limited applicants to one gender.
HR and legal depts that don't want their company to be sued for violating Title VII will make sure that they aren't recruiting only from Barnard, unless they're some bona fide exception (e.g. hiring models for women's clothing). This idea that they need to recruit from men's only career fairs is your own.
As other commenter pointed out, how is this different from advertising in women/men magazine? Should we ban those as well? Sure, one can argue that their readers are only 98% one gender. But then some people on FB lie about their gender and some browse FB on somebody else's account. E.g. My GF never logs out off Facebook on shared devices and I see ads targeting women all the time.
All in all, we should look at bigger problem of targeted advertising rather exclusive loaded cases. I've no idea what targeted advertising line is "good enough". On the other hand, targeted advertising is definitely causing massive societal problems and political polarisation.
How is this not seen as a good thing, not to be subjected to mind manipulation?
If you mean, “what if they had to make ads that promoted men wearing their products”, I get your point, but I thought it was a funny ambiguity.
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.
What if you are trying to get more female engineers at your company, and want to target women?
I guess my point is an targeted ad isn't evidence of intent to discriminate, and in fact can be a key component of pro-diversity actions.
For example, buying different scented shower gel based on the sex of the recipient.
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.
There was even a case recently where a man won a lawsuit because he was excluded by a clothing store that was searching for a female employee for doing an inventory job.
"Brussels, 23 August 2018 - The legal action taken by the Institute for Equality of Women and Men reminds employers that sex is not a criterion for refusing an application. The Leuven Labor Court has sentenced a clothing store to discrimination based on sex. He refused a man's candidacy because he wanted to hire a woman."
https://presscenter.org/nl/pressrelease/20180822/een-sollici... (dutch) https://presscenter.org/nl/pressrelease/20180822/een-sollici... (french)
That being said I also seen adverts asking for women but technically it's against the law and even with all those laws discriminations happen more often than not.
There are exceptions like modelling or acting where roles where there could be reasonable reasons for being gender-specific but not for the tech and public sector jobs described in the article.
Given the way issues like this overlap with the European Convention on Human Rights I would expect it to be very similar across Europe (certainly within the EU).
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.
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)?