> The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights said in a February 18 decision that Facebook’s algorithm reinforced gender stereotypes by mainly showing “typically female professions” to female Facebook users in the Netherlands and that Meta (META), the social platform’s owner, should have monitored and adjusted its algorithm to prevent that.
> For example, ads for mechanic positions were predominantly shown to men, while those for preschool teacher roles were primarily directed to women. Global Witness said its experiments in the Netherlands, France, India, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa demonstrated that the algorithm perpetuated similar biases around the world. The non-profit’s investigation led to four complaints from the Dutch human rights group Bureau Clara Wichmann and the French organization Fondation des Femmes.
I don't think any of this should be illegal. I don't think anyone is meaningfully harmed by being algorithmically shown job ads stereotypical of one gender rather than another, and I have no problem with any organization at all that does this, whether it's Meta or anyone else. I do not agree with the position of any of these European human rights organizations, and I'd probably be in favor of reforming French anti-discrimination law to explicitly legalize what Meta is doing here.
Say you have an advertising system that knows nothing about a user’s gender. This system, by construction, cannot vary its ad selections based on gender. But the system does remember whether users have expressed interest in the ads it has previously shown them.
Now say you have a job that in general appeals to one gender almost exclusively. The system will, given time, learn which users are interested in ads for this job. Those users will just happen to be almost exclusively of one gender.
If the ad system stops showing ads for this job to the users who have demonstrated they don’t want to see them, is that gender discrimination?
One can make an argument either way. But either way, it’s not going to be a clear-cut argument. There’s some subtlety required.
> If the ad system stops showing ads for this job to the users who have demonstrated they don’t want to see them, is that gender discrimination?
According to US employment law, yes, actually. That is something called disparate impact (unintentional discrimination), and it is illegal in the same way disparate treatment (intentional discrimination) is.
Remember, we make laws and they are there to make society work/better. So whilst the legal answer is "yes", I presume the real question was "_Is_ this gender discrimination?", as in; let's actually think about it instead of fobbing it off to the current state of the law.
If the law is nonsensical or harmful, it can and should be changed.
>If the ad system stops showing ads for this job to the users who have demonstrated they don’t want to see them, is that gender discrimination?
No, because they demonstrated intent. However, if the ad system extrapolates this behavior to users which previously have not interacted with such ads strictly selecting only users of certain gender, it will be gender-based discrimination.
Taken to its logical conclusion you essentially have to make targeted ads illegal. Now it's gender, next it's race, then it's socioeconomic standing. Then it's age. Etc etc.
I think making targeted ads illegal is a great idea all by itself. It would kneecap the entire surveillance and data industry built around tracking people for f**g ads. The gov will still track you though, but that's a different nut to crack.
Not op, but if I was paying for ads on a platform, I want to make the best use of my money, and target users that may more likely react positively. If this means that ads looking for mechanics are more likely to be seen by men, so be it, why should I show them to somebody not interested ?
Unless somebody says explicitly "no women", there is no discrimination in my opinion.
>why should I show them to somebody not interested ?
Because interaction goes both ways. A big influencer on women not being interested could be a societal expectation that is not a job for them, which you’re unknowingly reinforcing.
This is particularly important when it’s not “mechanic jobs” but “senior jobs” for example. Only male workers being “proposed” leadership positions over time leads to a statistically significant imbalance.
That’s a pretty simple rule but allows lots of deliberate ways to significantly reduce one group.
You have however written a thing here that’s fine - it’s totally fine if your advert is seen more by men. But what you want, and what we as a society generally want, is for those ads to be shown to likely candidates regardless of gender. Given two equally qualified people, do you want your ads to only be shown to one of them, because the other is a woman? I assume not because you want to hire th best person not the best man.
The issue isn’t that the ads are shown to more men because they target things like “has said they have worked as a mechanic and are looking for a job” and that happens to be more for men, the accusations is that Facebook is specifically using your gender to determine what job adverts to show you.
Reminds me of an old argument that if I'm running a restaurant, and if customers don't want to be served by coloured people or homosexuals, I shouldn't have to hire them. It's bad for business, what other reason do I need?
At some point, we have to face the fact that there are two kinds of freedom: The freedom TO something-or-other, and the freedom FROM something-or-other. And the two are often in tension, requiring actual judgment calls and weighing of values, because there is no one perfectly crafted set of objective rules to sort that mess out.
Some people care about the freedom from algorithms not showing them ads for jobs they are qualified to do and pay better, but the companies would prefer the freedom TO primarily hire whomever they please and advertise to whomever they please. Those two freedoms are in tension.
If the freedom from gender discrimination in the marketplace freedom doesn't matter to you, or matters les than the freedom for someone else TO advertise only to men, well, I can see that you are consistent in your beliefs of things I deeply disagree with.
Are you saying the harm from gender-based employment discrimination needs to be demonstrated, or that harm from facebook's permitting of that discrimination needs to be demonstrated?
You would need to connect men not being as prevalent in child care profession roles to some sort of systemic harm. Or women not being as prevalent in construction worker roles. Just because there's a discrepancy between the two genders doesn't mean there's systemic harm stemming from it.
the harm in child care and education should be obvious: children need role models of both genders. in no other profession is it as important for gender parity to be enforced. so at least in that area there is most certainly a systemic harm if one gender dominates.
You can always claim harm, but proving it is a different story.
Policies like that are based on results of psychological research such as "stereotype threat", which has recently fallen victim to the reproducibility crisis.
In other words, the entire social engineering structure of such laws may be a house built on sand.
How does what is advertised to you affect your opportunities? Opportunities are things that are available to you. Obviously people can seek out opportunities. They don't have to have them thrust in front of them.
Scope matters. On the level of the entire economy? Possibly yes, but you haven't shown that the entire economy will discriminate against X or Y; respective preferences of individual players may well balance out.
On the level of a single Acme, Inc.? What if that particular organization is unofficially hostile to a particular gender? I would say that in such case, it is more harmful to join it blindly and then suffer from the generally unfriendly environment than to steer clear of them in time.
I wouldn't personally like to become an employee in a corporation that prefers not to employ men and is only forced to do so by external powers. And I would prefer them to be honest and advertise that openly, to save my time and theirs from making an unhappy match.
If a company gets 0% response from a certain group, why should they have to pay for ads, when the likelihood they will find a candidate is next to nothing?
This also only ever goes in one direction. A friend of mine works for a company run by and employs 100% women.
In any other context, it would be illegal. Instead, it's considered 'diverse' and 'empowering'.
Based on statistics alone, it's obvious the company is hiring women based on choice.
Tech companies, like Duo, touted the fact that they had all women development teams a few years back. When discrimination like this is an accepted practice, I stop listening.
Maybe Tech companies like Duo are just running gendered job ads, and that's why men aren't applying - they never see the ads. By your logic, that would be totally acceptable, right?
The job was posted was in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'
But it was posted, and apparently that's what matters. So the ads that signpost you to the posting that only [people with special glasses] can see are just peachy.
I'd bet a chunk of cash that it's segmenting people, at least initially. And the "gender A" segment are seeing the ads that are popular with the "gender B" segment at a far lower rate, or not at all.
So it's not an individual's revealed preferences, it's a group's revealed preferences. And that's where the discrimination comes in.
So if I advertise my golfing equipment only in golf clubs, and golf clubs happen to be predominantly visited by old white men, am I discriminating against the young, against women, and against people of color?
There's a big difference between first-order and second-order effects. If you explicitly check the box that says "show this job only to old white men" then we can prove your intent was to discriminate. If you advertise at a golf club, we have no such proof.
Also, unless the golf club is discriminating, female golfers are just as able to see the ad -vs- male golfers.
Meta does not provide such a checkbox for explicit gender selection in Europe for job adds - it’s forbidden by law. But you can select interest, such as golfing. If more men happen to be interested in golf, more men will see your add.
Not the guy you're responding to but I'm not going to willingly pay money for pork rind ads to be shown to Muslims. In fact I'd go so far as to suggest that should be illegal as a hate crime.
Under that legal regime I could imagine Meta being simultaneously sued by one group of people for not discriminating enough on one demographic category, and by another group of people for discriminating too much along a different category. And this ultimately why I would like to see these kinds of laws repealed completely.
They accuse the algorithm of perpetuating gender stereotypes, but it's really society that's doing that. The ads are just trying to be the most efficient and in doing so they mirror the preferences of society. I don't know why anybody ever assumed that professions would ideally be 50-50 by gender, but that does seem to be something that people come into these arguments assuming.
Put another way, what's the conversion rate shear between mechanic job listings between women and men?
>I don't know why anybody ever assumed that professions would ideally be 50-50 by gender
It’s not that. We know that in most professions there’s no reason to assume that they should have a preferred gender. This means that even if pool of candidates is 99:1, that 1 candidate must have equal opportunities for employment. And that means no pre-screening through targeted ads.
So say a school has funding to find 10 candidates for a job using the biased algorithms. Are you saying it’s best to force the school to use an algorithm such that they only find 5 with it still unlikely that any of those 5 are of a different sex. In effect forcing schools to hire a worse member of staff(due to reduced candidate pool.)
It also means perpetuating the bias, more men will then apply for the job while maybe some women that could get interested didn't get it shown, reinforcing the already existing issue.
Why do we want to perpetuate biases without a chance to allow it to potentially be corrected?
Only if the advertiser restricts the audience to only men or only women or certain age groups. If there are no such restrictions, the algorithms self-balance over time naturally. But advertisers don't want that, because it makes them waste money, so instead they prefer to manually add targeting segments.
Nope. What you eventually get is women not getting a variety of jobs they could apply to and a death of men in professions that actually need more men (e.g. nurses, teachers etc.)
We already been through this. It's not ancient history
This is exploration vs exploitation dilemma. For example let's say that 10% of ads are thrown randomly, and from these random rolls these patterns are discovered:
> [Denver+<40-50> years+men]: mechanics +10%
> [Denver+<40-50> years+men]: nurse -5%
Then the system can apply these coefficients on 90% of the other traffic.
If you are making 100% exploration (so 100% random), then it means the people are going to miss their relevant job opportunity (having a net negative impact on the society).
Increasing exploration is a solution that would legally actually reduce biases of previouses patterns, but at the cost of less relevant content.
In all cases, if the bias is real, exploration discovers them and the coefficients already naturally adjust.
One exception, advertisers can artificially restrict saying "I want only men between 30-40" in their targeting filters.
Child labor, keeping women uneducated and many other practices were the norm across ancient history. Who are we to question the wisdom of our ancestors.
Ads are built the way they are because they are more effective. This presumably means women would rather be grade school teachers than car mechanics.
Second, some "institute" shouldn't be telling a company or anyone really what it can or can't show on its website. The Internet should remain a free place. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it.
Saves the employer money advertising. So schools save money. Also more realistically due to fixed budgets a school would get better quality staff. A fixed budget might mean previously the ad would be shown to 10 people interested. But if you are forced to show the ads to a bunch of people not interested you might only have it seen by one person interested.
Advertising will simultaneously become a lot more expensive and less effective. The ability of job seekers to find jobs they're willing to apply to will go down.
I dont think you understand the implications of banning this. In principle you ban any kind of content recommendation. Reddit, Netflix, YouTube, Twitter, etc.
No? Our society doesn't treat jobs as equally important as all kinds of content. Having rules around content recommendation around jobs is easily doable without banning any kind of content recommendation.
> I don't think anyone is meaningfully harmed by being algorithmically shown job ads stereotypical of one gender rather than another
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 was I not harmed by having a better opportunity hidden from me based on my presumed gender?
While any particular individual isn't "owed a job", it must be true that people as a whole are "owed" jobs and that if governments are incapable or unwilling to foster the economic environment that makes it possible for all working-age people to get jobs, then those governments are invalid. And, as much as we might want to deny it we do live in an era where it seems that maybe the economic environment does not provide enough jobs for the entirety of the population. Glibly saying "you're not owed a job" might not be strictly false, but it's certainly misleading and out of touch.
Yes, they are owed these jobs. But even if you reject that, the practical argument is that if we conduct society/civilization in a manner in which there are not enough jobs to go around, then they have no disincentive from burning it all down with the rest of us chained inside the building. This is the price of us building our civilization such that we left nothing for anyone to live without civilization... everyone has to get a livelihood or at least the potential for one, and we refuse to pay that price at our own peril.
This should be plainly obvious to anyone who bothers to think about it for even two minutes. I don't claim that they're "owed living wages", or "good jobs" or even "non-awful jobs". All those details can be hashed out later, no need to force them from the top down. But the "everyone working age gets a job if they want it" is extraordinarily non-negotiable.
Nobody is hiding anything. But the point about not being owed a job is that even if they were "hiding" something, that wouldn't be a problem. You are not owed visibility of a job in the same way you are not owed the job itself.
This is not true, at least in Europe. There exists well-established anti-discriminatory law, which dictates equal opportunity in employment. When targeted advertising is based only on demographic signals, it creates strong information asymmetry. Let’s say someone is not actively looking for a job, but gets information about new opportunities through ads more frequently, than someone else with same skills but different gender or background. When this happens at scale, the people like the first person will have more upward mobility than second group. Or the second group has to invest considerably more resources to find a better job. This is classic discrimination.
This sub-thread isn't really about what is legal (or illegal) in Europe or any other jurisdiction. It is about what is right.
When it comes to legality and enforcement though, it does seem highly inconsistent to enforce something like this, which isn't actually discrimination on its own (rather it could lead to discrimination), when at the same time orgs are very obviously participating in actual discrimination ("we'd like this role to be filled by {insert group here}") in Europe and elsewhere.
> This sub-thread isn't really about what is legal (or illegal) in Europe or any other jurisdiction. It is about what is right.
My argument wasn’t about whether it’s legal or not. It’s discrimination, which is both illegal and wrong.
> when at the same time orgs are very obviously participating in actual discrimination
I don’t think so. Please provide evidence. Which orgs and where? In Germany all job postings explicitly say „(m/w/d)“ in title (male/female/diverse). I would be surprised to see any demographic-related constraints as they are easily challenged in court.
Let’s say you have group A and group B, both of which have suitable candidates for the job. The information about the job is available via pull (job boards) and push (ads) channels. A has access to both channels, B only to pull. In this case A has statistically higher chances to get that job than B, if they have no other differences. If B is already disadvantaged, this just increases the gap.
Your question is, in this model, why pull isn’t covering the absence of push (i.e. pull conversion >> push conversion). But that is obvious: if it was the case, there would be no need to spend money on ads. The very existence of those ads confirms that push channel is significant. And that means that platform does pre-screening of candidates based on gender, which is illegal.
Maybe the actual reason you are applying for and getting a lower paying girl job is because you lack the initiative to try to get a higher paying job yourself and instead are blindly making life decisions based on what ads in media you happen to encounter, and then blame this on some company tricking you.
Ahh nothing better than seeing someone on the wild thinking that their life decisions are 100% independent from their environment. Enjoy your false sense of freedom while you can!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are the anti-discrimination laws based on anything else than feelings of their proponents with regard to what is wrong and what is right?
If this sort of discrimination was economically ineffective, you would see the market itself slowly adjusting towards a more efficient equilibrium, even without explicit laws.
> Discrimination is not rooted in economic efficiency so I don’t follow the argument that market forces would correct it.
It absolutely is in this case. The whole reason to target ads is to make the people who receive them more likely to engage with them. For instance, including men, elderly people, and children in the target demographic for a preschool teacher job advertisement would make that advertisement significantly less efficient, which is why it's not done.
Forcing companies to disallow targeting of ads because some people are offended by the population's job preferences is absurd.
It took a long time for doctors to become more balanced despite it not necessarily being economically efficient. There’s inertia where people don’t like changing the status quo. I don’t know if solving the ad targeting changes anything given that the bias is on the advertiser side, but it could conceivably change the candidate pool that is being selected from.
This is basically just a consequence of people being a long-lived species.
The question is whether the side effects of artificially speeding up the process won't negate the original intent.
Also, the very fundament may be wrong. The authors of anti-discrimination statutes seem to be awfully certain of things such as "men can take care of babies in nurseries equally well as women can". We do not know if this is, in fact, statistically true. It is more of an egalitarian article of faith.
There was discrimination for very very long periods of times. For example, Jews weren’t allowed to hold many professions for a very long time in Europe. Black people in America were slaves and continue to feel the effects of discrimination today. It still exists in other cultures today. The idea that capitalism solves discrimination magically does not appear to be borne out in any evidence I can find. Economic efficiency takes advantage of societal changes and removal of discrimination. Not the other way around.
"The idea that capitalism solves discrimination magically does not appear to be borne out in any evidence I can find."
We should distinguish between formal legal disabilities ("Jews are prohibited from X by law") from informal discrimination that is the target of modern anti-discrimination law ("Sean Murphy does not want to employ any goddamn Englishmen"). Emancipation has a reasonably good, though not perfect, record. Anti-discrimination is a much newer idea which is much less proven in practice, though for plenty of people, it sounds convincing on paper.
If you look at the European Jews specifically, upon formal emancipation, they were able to establish themselves very quickly, both in business and the academia. In fact much of the subsequent 20th century anti-Semitism was borne out of jealousy of their success.
You won't find many aftereffects of the long-lived Chinese Exclusion Act or Japanese Internment Camps on the current well-being of Asian Americans either.
As for women, they are now outnumbering men in higher education by a considerable margin and, in the young cohorts, outearn them. By the logic of affirmative actions, there should be one for men probably...
It is true that not every group in the world was able to catch up once their shackles were released, but plenty of them actually were, and there was nothing magical about it.
Notably, the one exceptional group that mostly didn't catch up - American blacks - seems to be struggling even with all sorts of formal crutches constructed with the intent to help them. For example, the diversity programs at Harvard et al. seem to be mostly exploited by recent immigrants from Africa instead of generational American blacks.
And the “untouchable” cast in India? No laws against them but still discriminated against socially and economically and this discrimination even has even been transported to the US despite India and the US being nominally free markets.
It’s the paradox of tolerance - if you allow informal intolerance to fester it can metastasize into institutional and structural intolerance. But it’s quaint to suggest that economic market forces somehow themselves remove discrimination.
Fair enough. I have seen attempts to justify anti-discrimination laws by very shaky economic research too often.
A moral stand is, as you say, independent of the economic ramifications, but as far as "outdated" things go, they may come back to fashion again. Given the current wild political swings between the left and the right, I wouldn't be surprised if at least some Western countries abolished or watered down their anti-discrimination statutes in the next decade or so.
Anti-discrimination laws exist because of the exceptionally well-documented tendency of people in positions of power to judge people based on their gender, sexuality, creed or the color of their skin.
I don't doubt that there are people who operate on a "well, I am a Muslim so I want Muslim employees" scheme or similar ones (woman, black, young), but I do believe that this should be covered by freedom of association.
I do understand that you think otherwise, I have met many people who see things differently.
There is nothing to "misunderstand" here, this is not algebra but law, and law often erects artificial and arbitrary barriers in the middle of things, in order to further some specific interests or agenda.
The closest analogy I can find is the concept that commercial speech deserves less protection than private speech.
It is a matter of opinion and prevailing mores. In my opinion, becoming an employee is a voluntary decision (unlike, say, being drafted into a war), and should be treated the same as becoming a trade union member or a volunteer in a church organization.
Totally agree. EU and Europe is going insane with crazy ass laws to punish american companies and regulate everything to death, while they allow their states get away with becoming totalitarian. #unreal
Are those algorithms actually doing the right thing? Most of mechanics are men, same for pre-school teachers are women...these are facts not discrimination or bias.
I mean, "right" is a social construct. It is likely more effective ad targeting, but European law outlaws this despite that, because they believe it is better social policy, decided through the democratic process.
Like, if it was a bad idea to do, there'd be less reason to outlaw it, right? Since there'd be no incentive for companies like Facebook to do it anyways.
This reminds me of the Harvard Implicit Association test, particularly the gender career one. It will tell you if you implicitly associate certain careers with certain genders.
Since the overwhelming majority of, say, auto mechanics, are held by men, associating these roles with men is entirely accurate. Without saying anything of what it "should" be.
If your results were anything else, it suggests some kind of powerful overcompensating counter bias is as play. That your desire to see more gender balance in this role is so great, that you subconsciously already believe it to be normal. The real world is a deviation from where it "should" be. This strikes me as a rather pernicious position. Dogmatic. Almost religious.
Are these ads in the sense of unsolicited adverts, or is this some kind of job search engine where people are actively asking Facebook to find a job for them?
If Facebook have actively hidden job opportunities from someone who is actively searching for employment, that seems like clear and harmful discrimination. If they have just shown targeted ads to someone, possibly mixed into the general adstream, then that seems like a nothingburger.
Unless it has changed, the max character length on a submission title is 80 characters, which this matches exactly. I assume "body" was dropped to make it fit.
But isn’t the point of ads and all these tech companies with billions of data points, is to optimize ads to the people who are most likely to click them?
I hate ads, and I hate Facebook and all its products, but this just sounds like a bunch of people who misunderstand what ads are for and want equality for the sake of equality.
> The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights said in a February 18 decision that Facebook’s algorithm reinforced gender stereotypes by mainly showing “typically female professions” to female Facebook users in the Netherlands and that Meta (META), the social platform’s owner, should have monitored and adjusted its algorithm to prevent that.
> For example, ads for mechanic positions were predominantly shown to men, while those for preschool teacher roles were primarily directed to women. Global Witness said its experiments in the Netherlands, France, India, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa demonstrated that the algorithm perpetuated similar biases around the world. The non-profit’s investigation led to four complaints from the Dutch human rights group Bureau Clara Wichmann and the French organization Fondation des Femmes.
I don't think any of this should be illegal. I don't think anyone is meaningfully harmed by being algorithmically shown job ads stereotypical of one gender rather than another, and I have no problem with any organization at all that does this, whether it's Meta or anyone else. I do not agree with the position of any of these European human rights organizations, and I'd probably be in favor of reforming French anti-discrimination law to explicitly legalize what Meta is doing here.
Can you explain why you think this?
Not the OP, but:
This is actually a thorny problem.
Say you have an advertising system that knows nothing about a user’s gender. This system, by construction, cannot vary its ad selections based on gender. But the system does remember whether users have expressed interest in the ads it has previously shown them.
Now say you have a job that in general appeals to one gender almost exclusively. The system will, given time, learn which users are interested in ads for this job. Those users will just happen to be almost exclusively of one gender.
If the ad system stops showing ads for this job to the users who have demonstrated they don’t want to see them, is that gender discrimination?
One can make an argument either way. But either way, it’s not going to be a clear-cut argument. There’s some subtlety required.
Is this really what's happening or are the ads tuned by the advertiser for men, or for people who have preferences for the things men want.
Is Facebook selecting the targeted groups or delivering ads to them?
> If the ad system stops showing ads for this job to the users who have demonstrated they don’t want to see them, is that gender discrimination?
According to US employment law, yes, actually. That is something called disparate impact (unintentional discrimination), and it is illegal in the same way disparate treatment (intentional discrimination) is.
Remember, we make laws and they are there to make society work/better. So whilst the legal answer is "yes", I presume the real question was "_Is_ this gender discrimination?", as in; let's actually think about it instead of fobbing it off to the current state of the law.
If the law is nonsensical or harmful, it can and should be changed.
>If the ad system stops showing ads for this job to the users who have demonstrated they don’t want to see them, is that gender discrimination?
No, because they demonstrated intent. However, if the ad system extrapolates this behavior to users which previously have not interacted with such ads strictly selecting only users of certain gender, it will be gender-based discrimination.
Taken to its logical conclusion you essentially have to make targeted ads illegal. Now it's gender, next it's race, then it's socioeconomic standing. Then it's age. Etc etc.
I think making targeted ads illegal is a great idea all by itself. It would kneecap the entire surveillance and data industry built around tracking people for f**g ads. The gov will still track you though, but that's a different nut to crack.
for job ads that is exactly right. discrimination in hiring is already illegal, and therefore logically targeted jobs ads are illegal too.
Not op, but if I was paying for ads on a platform, I want to make the best use of my money, and target users that may more likely react positively. If this means that ads looking for mechanics are more likely to be seen by men, so be it, why should I show them to somebody not interested ?
Unless somebody says explicitly "no women", there is no discrimination in my opinion.
>why should I show them to somebody not interested ?
Because interaction goes both ways. A big influencer on women not being interested could be a societal expectation that is not a job for them, which you’re unknowingly reinforcing.
This is particularly important when it’s not “mechanic jobs” but “senior jobs” for example. Only male workers being “proposed” leadership positions over time leads to a statistically significant imbalance.
That’s a pretty simple rule but allows lots of deliberate ways to significantly reduce one group.
You have however written a thing here that’s fine - it’s totally fine if your advert is seen more by men. But what you want, and what we as a society generally want, is for those ads to be shown to likely candidates regardless of gender. Given two equally qualified people, do you want your ads to only be shown to one of them, because the other is a woman? I assume not because you want to hire th best person not the best man.
The issue isn’t that the ads are shown to more men because they target things like “has said they have worked as a mechanic and are looking for a job” and that happens to be more for men, the accusations is that Facebook is specifically using your gender to determine what job adverts to show you.
Reminds me of an old argument that if I'm running a restaurant, and if customers don't want to be served by coloured people or homosexuals, I shouldn't have to hire them. It's bad for business, what other reason do I need?
At some point, we have to face the fact that there are two kinds of freedom: The freedom TO something-or-other, and the freedom FROM something-or-other. And the two are often in tension, requiring actual judgment calls and weighing of values, because there is no one perfectly crafted set of objective rules to sort that mess out.
Some people care about the freedom from algorithms not showing them ads for jobs they are qualified to do and pay better, but the companies would prefer the freedom TO primarily hire whomever they please and advertise to whomever they please. Those two freedoms are in tension.
If the freedom from gender discrimination in the marketplace freedom doesn't matter to you, or matters les than the freedom for someone else TO advertise only to men, well, I can see that you are consistent in your beliefs of things I deeply disagree with.
To ban this would mean in principle you need to ban any kind of algorithm that uses user and/or activity data for any platform.
Ie. No content recommendations on reddit, tikok, facebook, youtube, amazon, twiter, etc.
The algorithm is responding to people's revealed preferences in what job ads they want to see
All discrimination can be described as "revealed preference". A very convenient way of ignoring systemic harm.
The onus needs to be on convincingly demonstrating the alleged systemic harm. Until then, "revealed preference" seems more appropriate.
Are you saying the harm from gender-based employment discrimination needs to be demonstrated, or that harm from facebook's permitting of that discrimination needs to be demonstrated?
You're begging the question.
The challenge is to compel belief that unequal gender distribution across professions creates a systemic harm.
You would need to connect men not being as prevalent in child care profession roles to some sort of systemic harm. Or women not being as prevalent in construction worker roles. Just because there's a discrepancy between the two genders doesn't mean there's systemic harm stemming from it.
the harm in child care and education should be obvious: children need role models of both genders. in no other profession is it as important for gender parity to be enforced. so at least in that area there is most certainly a systemic harm if one gender dominates.
You can always claim harm, but proving it is a different story.
Policies like that are based on results of psychological research such as "stereotype threat", which has recently fallen victim to the reproducibility crisis.
In other words, the entire social engineering structure of such laws may be a house built on sand.
Having fewer opportunities is obviously a harm.
If it's NOT harm, then it should be legal for job boards to only show positions to the desired gender, right?
How does what is advertised to you affect your opportunities? Opportunities are things that are available to you. Obviously people can seek out opportunities. They don't have to have them thrust in front of them.
"Having fewer opportunities is obviously a harm."
Scope matters. On the level of the entire economy? Possibly yes, but you haven't shown that the entire economy will discriminate against X or Y; respective preferences of individual players may well balance out.
On the level of a single Acme, Inc.? What if that particular organization is unofficially hostile to a particular gender? I would say that in such case, it is more harmful to join it blindly and then suffer from the generally unfriendly environment than to steer clear of them in time.
I wouldn't personally like to become an employee in a corporation that prefers not to employ men and is only forced to do so by external powers. And I would prefer them to be honest and advertise that openly, to save my time and theirs from making an unhappy match.
If a company gets 0% response from a certain group, why should they have to pay for ads, when the likelihood they will find a candidate is next to nothing?
This also only ever goes in one direction. A friend of mine works for a company run by and employs 100% women.
In any other context, it would be illegal. Instead, it's considered 'diverse' and 'empowering'.
Based on statistics alone, it's obvious the company is hiring women based on choice.
Tech companies, like Duo, touted the fact that they had all women development teams a few years back. When discrimination like this is an accepted practice, I stop listening.
Maybe Tech companies like Duo are just running gendered job ads, and that's why men aren't applying - they never see the ads. By your logic, that would be totally acceptable, right?
again, these are ads. not job postings, job ads. it's not "harmful" to enable advertisers to choose which audiences to target.
It is harmful and it is also illegal.
At least according to “Is It Discriminatory to Advertise Job Opportunities on Facebook?”, https://www.thatcherlaw.com/blog/2022/12/is-it-discriminator...
The job was posted was in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'
But it was posted, and apparently that's what matters. So the ads that signpost you to the posting that only [people with special glasses] can see are just peachy.
oh, do save your snark for reddit.
"A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true."
I'd bet a chunk of cash that it's segmenting people, at least initially. And the "gender A" segment are seeing the ads that are popular with the "gender B" segment at a far lower rate, or not at all.
So it's not an individual's revealed preferences, it's a group's revealed preferences. And that's where the discrimination comes in.
How far are you willing to stretch this? What about skin color? Nationality? Religion?
So if I advertise my golfing equipment only in golf clubs, and golf clubs happen to be predominantly visited by old white men, am I discriminating against the young, against women, and against people of color?
There's a big difference between first-order and second-order effects. If you explicitly check the box that says "show this job only to old white men" then we can prove your intent was to discriminate. If you advertise at a golf club, we have no such proof.
Also, unless the golf club is discriminating, female golfers are just as able to see the ad -vs- male golfers.
Meta does not provide such a checkbox for explicit gender selection in Europe for job adds - it’s forbidden by law. But you can select interest, such as golfing. If more men happen to be interested in golf, more men will see your add.
Not the guy you're responding to but I'm not going to willingly pay money for pork rind ads to be shown to Muslims. In fact I'd go so far as to suggest that should be illegal as a hate crime.
Under that legal regime I could imagine Meta being simultaneously sued by one group of people for not discriminating enough on one demographic category, and by another group of people for discriminating too much along a different category. And this ultimately why I would like to see these kinds of laws repealed completely.
only if the ads are targeted specifically at muslims. otherwise such ads would be offensive even if posted on streets in cities where muslims live.
They accuse the algorithm of perpetuating gender stereotypes, but it's really society that's doing that. The ads are just trying to be the most efficient and in doing so they mirror the preferences of society. I don't know why anybody ever assumed that professions would ideally be 50-50 by gender, but that does seem to be something that people come into these arguments assuming.
Put another way, what's the conversion rate shear between mechanic job listings between women and men?
Overall, agree with your take.
>I don't know why anybody ever assumed that professions would ideally be 50-50 by gender
It’s not that. We know that in most professions there’s no reason to assume that they should have a preferred gender. This means that even if pool of candidates is 99:1, that 1 candidate must have equal opportunities for employment. And that means no pre-screening through targeted ads.
So say a school has funding to find 10 candidates for a job using the biased algorithms. Are you saying it’s best to force the school to use an algorithm such that they only find 5 with it still unlikely that any of those 5 are of a different sex. In effect forcing schools to hire a worse member of staff(due to reduced candidate pool.)
In what part of Multiverse funding is allocated for use of biased algorithms that enable discrimination?
Why does it mean that?
What is gained from allowing such bias?
Situation: Men are clicking on job of mechanics, more than women.
Consequence: men are now more likely shown mechanics job.
What is gained: more accurate content, more interesting content, more engagement.
As a result: men are more likely to be shown jobs interesting for men, and women are more likely to be shown jobs interesting for women.
Which means: Increased chances to find a matching job, and to save time doing so.
It also means perpetuating the bias, more men will then apply for the job while maybe some women that could get interested didn't get it shown, reinforcing the already existing issue.
Why do we want to perpetuate biases without a chance to allow it to potentially be corrected?
Only if the advertiser restricts the audience to only men or only women or certain age groups. If there are no such restrictions, the algorithms self-balance over time naturally. But advertisers don't want that, because it makes them waste money, so instead they prefer to manually add targeting segments.
Nope. What you eventually get is women not getting a variety of jobs they could apply to and a death of men in professions that actually need more men (e.g. nurses, teachers etc.)
We already been through this. It's not ancient history
Keep in mind that these advertising algorithms are never 100% pushing jobs catered for a specific group, they keep a % of exploration.
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/machine_learning/machine_lear...
This is exploration vs exploitation dilemma. For example let's say that 10% of ads are thrown randomly, and from these random rolls these patterns are discovered:
> [Denver+<40-50> years+men]: mechanics +10%
> [Denver+<40-50> years+men]: nurse -5%
Then the system can apply these coefficients on 90% of the other traffic.
If you are making 100% exploration (so 100% random), then it means the people are going to miss their relevant job opportunity (having a net negative impact on the society).
Increasing exploration is a solution that would legally actually reduce biases of previouses patterns, but at the cost of less relevant content.
In all cases, if the bias is real, exploration discovers them and the coefficients already naturally adjust.
One exception, advertisers can artificially restrict saying "I want only men between 30-40" in their targeting filters.
Then what Meta can do ? Not much.
> One exception, advertisers can artificially restrict saying "I want only men between 30-40" in their targeting filters.
> Then what Meta can do ? Not much.
--- start quote ---
“We do not allow advertisers to target these ads based on gender,” Settle said in a 2023 statement.
--- end quote ---
Meta can start by doing what they claim they are doing?
I think gendered professions are the norm across ancient history. Algorithmic advertising didn't create this.
Child labor, keeping women uneducated and many other practices were the norm across ancient history. Who are we to question the wisdom of our ancestors.
Yeahhhhhh, those jobs don't have those ratios due to facebook ads.
[flagged]
Ads are built the way they are because they are more effective. This presumably means women would rather be grade school teachers than car mechanics.
Second, some "institute" shouldn't be telling a company or anyone really what it can or can't show on its website. The Internet should remain a free place. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it.
Saves the employer money advertising. So schools save money. Also more realistically due to fixed budgets a school would get better quality staff. A fixed budget might mean previously the ad would be shown to 10 people interested. But if you are forced to show the ads to a bunch of people not interested you might only have it seen by one person interested.
What's to be gained by making it illegal under French law?
Advertising will simultaneously become a lot more expensive and less effective. The ability of job seekers to find jobs they're willing to apply to will go down.
Are those not goals of yours?
> Advertising will simultaneously become a lot more expensive and less effective.
Oh no!
> The ability of job seekers to find jobs they're willing to apply to will go down.
The playing field will be level.
Who doesn't love a perfectly informed market?
Ads being more expensive and less effective sounds great to me
More efficient advertising. Not worth it in my opinion though.
I dont think you understand the implications of banning this. In principle you ban any kind of content recommendation. Reddit, Netflix, YouTube, Twitter, etc.
No? Our society doesn't treat jobs as equally important as all kinds of content. Having rules around content recommendation around jobs is easily doable without banning any kind of content recommendation.
Or did I miss obvious sarcasm?
The content you consume has a large influence in your education and career.
If you get recommendations for "Technology" and someone of the opposite sex doesn't its completely discriminatory.
If you don't think its a problem then you likely dont understand how recommendation systems work.
The only way recommendations could work is you would explicitly state preferences for everything upfront and no engagement data is used.
> I don't think anyone is meaningfully harmed by being algorithmically shown job ads stereotypical of one gender rather than another
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 was I not harmed by having a better opportunity hidden from me based on my presumed gender?
You are not owed either job. Getting a high-paying "boy job" is your own responsibility if you want one.
While any particular individual isn't "owed a job", it must be true that people as a whole are "owed" jobs and that if governments are incapable or unwilling to foster the economic environment that makes it possible for all working-age people to get jobs, then those governments are invalid. And, as much as we might want to deny it we do live in an era where it seems that maybe the economic environment does not provide enough jobs for the entirety of the population. Glibly saying "you're not owed a job" might not be strictly false, but it's certainly misleading and out of touch.
No, people as a whole are obviously not "owed" jobs. Why would you be owed a job?
Yes, they are owed these jobs. But even if you reject that, the practical argument is that if we conduct society/civilization in a manner in which there are not enough jobs to go around, then they have no disincentive from burning it all down with the rest of us chained inside the building. This is the price of us building our civilization such that we left nothing for anyone to live without civilization... everyone has to get a livelihood or at least the potential for one, and we refuse to pay that price at our own peril.
This should be plainly obvious to anyone who bothers to think about it for even two minutes. I don't claim that they're "owed living wages", or "good jobs" or even "non-awful jobs". All those details can be hashed out later, no need to force them from the top down. But the "everyone working age gets a job if they want it" is extraordinarily non-negotiable.
Who said anyone was owed a job? The problem is that hiding listings from people based on their gender obviously impacts who gets what jobs.
Nobody is hiding anything. But the point about not being owed a job is that even if they were "hiding" something, that wouldn't be a problem. You are not owed visibility of a job in the same way you are not owed the job itself.
This is not true, at least in Europe. There exists well-established anti-discriminatory law, which dictates equal opportunity in employment. When targeted advertising is based only on demographic signals, it creates strong information asymmetry. Let’s say someone is not actively looking for a job, but gets information about new opportunities through ads more frequently, than someone else with same skills but different gender or background. When this happens at scale, the people like the first person will have more upward mobility than second group. Or the second group has to invest considerably more resources to find a better job. This is classic discrimination.
This sub-thread isn't really about what is legal (or illegal) in Europe or any other jurisdiction. It is about what is right.
When it comes to legality and enforcement though, it does seem highly inconsistent to enforce something like this, which isn't actually discrimination on its own (rather it could lead to discrimination), when at the same time orgs are very obviously participating in actual discrimination ("we'd like this role to be filled by {insert group here}") in Europe and elsewhere.
> This sub-thread isn't really about what is legal (or illegal) in Europe or any other jurisdiction. It is about what is right.
My argument wasn’t about whether it’s legal or not. It’s discrimination, which is both illegal and wrong.
> when at the same time orgs are very obviously participating in actual discrimination
I don’t think so. Please provide evidence. Which orgs and where? In Germany all job postings explicitly say „(m/w/d)“ in title (male/female/diverse). I would be surprised to see any demographic-related constraints as they are easily challenged in court.
> invest considerably more resources
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we just talking about going to a job board and searching for the job you're interested in?
Let’s say you have group A and group B, both of which have suitable candidates for the job. The information about the job is available via pull (job boards) and push (ads) channels. A has access to both channels, B only to pull. In this case A has statistically higher chances to get that job than B, if they have no other differences. If B is already disadvantaged, this just increases the gap.
Your question is, in this model, why pull isn’t covering the absence of push (i.e. pull conversion >> push conversion). But that is obvious: if it was the case, there would be no need to spend money on ads. The very existence of those ads confirms that push channel is significant. And that means that platform does pre-screening of candidates based on gender, which is illegal.
Maybe the actual reason you are applying for and getting a lower paying girl job is because you lack the initiative to try to get a higher paying job yourself and instead are blindly making life decisions based on what ads in media you happen to encounter, and then blame this on some company tricking you.
Ahh nothing better than seeing someone on the wild thinking that their life decisions are 100% independent from their environment. Enjoy your false sense of freedom while you can!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Well I don't really care what you think or agree with and I'm quite happy to see Meta reprimanded.
Since all you offered were your feelings, there isn't anything of substance to follow up on beyond that.
Are the anti-discrimination laws based on anything else than feelings of their proponents with regard to what is wrong and what is right?
If this sort of discrimination was economically ineffective, you would see the market itself slowly adjusting towards a more efficient equilibrium, even without explicit laws.
Discrimination is not rooted in economic efficiency so I don’t follow the argument that market forces would correct it.
"Discrimination is not rooted in economic efficiency"
I don't think we know this, it is more of a fervent wish.
> Discrimination is not rooted in economic efficiency so I don’t follow the argument that market forces would correct it.
It absolutely is in this case. The whole reason to target ads is to make the people who receive them more likely to engage with them. For instance, including men, elderly people, and children in the target demographic for a preschool teacher job advertisement would make that advertisement significantly less efficient, which is why it's not done.
Forcing companies to disallow targeting of ads because some people are offended by the population's job preferences is absurd.
It took a long time for doctors to become more balanced despite it not necessarily being economically efficient. There’s inertia where people don’t like changing the status quo. I don’t know if solving the ad targeting changes anything given that the bias is on the advertiser side, but it could conceivably change the candidate pool that is being selected from.
This is basically just a consequence of people being a long-lived species.
The question is whether the side effects of artificially speeding up the process won't negate the original intent.
Also, the very fundament may be wrong. The authors of anti-discrimination statutes seem to be awfully certain of things such as "men can take care of babies in nurseries equally well as women can". We do not know if this is, in fact, statistically true. It is more of an egalitarian article of faith.
There was discrimination for very very long periods of times. For example, Jews weren’t allowed to hold many professions for a very long time in Europe. Black people in America were slaves and continue to feel the effects of discrimination today. It still exists in other cultures today. The idea that capitalism solves discrimination magically does not appear to be borne out in any evidence I can find. Economic efficiency takes advantage of societal changes and removal of discrimination. Not the other way around.
"The idea that capitalism solves discrimination magically does not appear to be borne out in any evidence I can find."
We should distinguish between formal legal disabilities ("Jews are prohibited from X by law") from informal discrimination that is the target of modern anti-discrimination law ("Sean Murphy does not want to employ any goddamn Englishmen"). Emancipation has a reasonably good, though not perfect, record. Anti-discrimination is a much newer idea which is much less proven in practice, though for plenty of people, it sounds convincing on paper.
If you look at the European Jews specifically, upon formal emancipation, they were able to establish themselves very quickly, both in business and the academia. In fact much of the subsequent 20th century anti-Semitism was borne out of jealousy of their success.
You won't find many aftereffects of the long-lived Chinese Exclusion Act or Japanese Internment Camps on the current well-being of Asian Americans either.
As for women, they are now outnumbering men in higher education by a considerable margin and, in the young cohorts, outearn them. By the logic of affirmative actions, there should be one for men probably...
It is true that not every group in the world was able to catch up once their shackles were released, but plenty of them actually were, and there was nothing magical about it.
Notably, the one exceptional group that mostly didn't catch up - American blacks - seems to be struggling even with all sorts of formal crutches constructed with the intent to help them. For example, the diversity programs at Harvard et al. seem to be mostly exploited by recent immigrants from Africa instead of generational American blacks.
And the “untouchable” cast in India? No laws against them but still discriminated against socially and economically and this discrimination even has even been transported to the US despite India and the US being nominally free markets.
It’s the paradox of tolerance - if you allow informal intolerance to fester it can metastasize into institutional and structural intolerance. But it’s quaint to suggest that economic market forces somehow themselves remove discrimination.
They're based on the notion that gender discrimination is outdated. It's certainly a particular ideology but I think it's a worthwhile one.
I don't judge things by economic effectiveness; slavery was economically effective at one time but it was still wrong.
"I don't judge things by economic effectiveness;"
Fair enough. I have seen attempts to justify anti-discrimination laws by very shaky economic research too often.
A moral stand is, as you say, independent of the economic ramifications, but as far as "outdated" things go, they may come back to fashion again. Given the current wild political swings between the left and the right, I wouldn't be surprised if at least some Western countries abolished or watered down their anti-discrimination statutes in the next decade or so.
Anti-discrimination laws exist because of the exceptionally well-documented tendency of people in positions of power to judge people based on their gender, sexuality, creed or the color of their skin.
I don't doubt that there are people who operate on a "well, I am a Muslim so I want Muslim employees" scheme or similar ones (woman, black, young), but I do believe that this should be covered by freedom of association.
I do understand that you think otherwise, I have met many people who see things differently.
Freedom of association has nothing to do with companies and employers. You misunderstand what it is completely if you believe so.
There is nothing to "misunderstand" here, this is not algebra but law, and law often erects artificial and arbitrary barriers in the middle of things, in order to further some specific interests or agenda.
The closest analogy I can find is the concept that commercial speech deserves less protection than private speech.
It is a matter of opinion and prevailing mores. In my opinion, becoming an employee is a voluntary decision (unlike, say, being drafted into a war), and should be treated the same as becoming a trade union member or a volunteer in a church organization.
Totally agree. EU and Europe is going insane with crazy ass laws to punish american companies and regulate everything to death, while they allow their states get away with becoming totalitarian. #unreal
FYI, this practice has been ruled illegal in the US as well under employment discrimination laws.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/historic-decision-digita...
I invite you to stop the screeching speech, it's self-defeating and usually the sign of a mind incapable of nuance.
Learn nuance, it's going to help you in life...
Worth mentioning the case brought by the DOJ against Meta with regards housing ads discriminating on protected characteristics in 2022.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Are those algorithms actually doing the right thing? Most of mechanics are men, same for pre-school teachers are women...these are facts not discrimination or bias.
I mean, "right" is a social construct. It is likely more effective ad targeting, but European law outlaws this despite that, because they believe it is better social policy, decided through the democratic process.
Like, if it was a bad idea to do, there'd be less reason to outlaw it, right? Since there'd be no incentive for companies like Facebook to do it anyways.
This reminds me of the Harvard Implicit Association test, particularly the gender career one. It will tell you if you implicitly associate certain careers with certain genders.
Since the overwhelming majority of, say, auto mechanics, are held by men, associating these roles with men is entirely accurate. Without saying anything of what it "should" be.
If your results were anything else, it suggests some kind of powerful overcompensating counter bias is as play. That your desire to see more gender balance in this role is so great, that you subconsciously already believe it to be normal. The real world is a deviation from where it "should" be. This strikes me as a rather pernicious position. Dogmatic. Almost religious.
Are these ads in the sense of unsolicited adverts, or is this some kind of job search engine where people are actively asking Facebook to find a job for them?
Why does that distinction matter?
Not highlighting something is different than hiding it.
If Facebook have actively hidden job opportunities from someone who is actively searching for employment, that seems like clear and harmful discrimination. If they have just shown targeted ads to someone, possibly mixed into the general adstream, then that seems like a nothingburger.
Title is incorrect: human rights body
Unless it has changed, the max character length on a submission title is 80 characters, which this matches exactly. I assume "body" was dropped to make it fit.
Ok, we've put the body in the title above.
(macintux is correct about the char limit)
But isn’t the point of ads and all these tech companies with billions of data points, is to optimize ads to the people who are most likely to click them?
I hate ads, and I hate Facebook and all its products, but this just sounds like a bunch of people who misunderstand what ads are for and want equality for the sake of equality.
Isn't Europe where headshots are a mandatory part of résumés?
I'm sure that Officially Doesn't contribute to discrimination.
Sweden is in Europe and no, it's not mandatory and I've never even seen one with a picture.
It's not mandatory, but a headshot is indeed expected in the Europass CV format: https://www.google.com/search?q=europass+cv&tbs=imgo:1&udm=2 .
I don't think many people use it, though.