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.