
Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads - shrikant
https://www.propublica.org/article/employers-used-facebook-to-keep-women-and-older-workers-from-seeing-job-ads-the-federal-government-thinks-thats-illegal
======
stakhanov
There are job boards that SPECIFICALLY make it their business to target women
and deliver female candidates looking for tech roles (in organizations that
are in need of diversity hires):

    
    
      https://powertofly.com/
    

...and companies pay a premium for those job advertising channels.

Why is it a great business and an initiative to be applauded if it is about
excluding men and a scandal if it is about excluding women?

~~~
adrianN
I think for similar reasons like it generally being seen as a good thing to
give free food and housing to the poor, but frowned upon to do the same for
the rich.

~~~
zahrc
I have trouble to understand your message behind your analogy...

From what I get is that you are referring to woman as the poor, and man as the
rich.

Just because it's a man dominated field, does it mean the others remaining
have no chance to get anything in that field?

If so, do you suggest that one half of the world is not allowed to have these
jobs at the same condition because some people already do, just because they
have a male reproductive system? --- Meaning that all men are representative
for all men, the same for women?

This is not equality.

~~~
stakhanov
I object to the use of "dominated". In a herd, a "dominant" animal will
actively work to keep others away from food sources and mating opportunities
when those are scarce. This is not what this is.

Strictly my opinion: There are few women in software engineering because few
women WANT to be in software engineering, period. ...and it's not a given that
this is by definition a bad thing for them either.

~~~
hutzlibu
Maybe one of the reasons women do not want to work in IT is, that the
atmosphere is still sometimes sexist?

Or at least arkward. When I started to study IT, I was surprised to see, that
the stereotypes were the majority. Meaning, long, oily hair, etc.

So I guess that is still changing, and I really do not believe 50% women
should be the goal, but maybe the IT world still needs reflection sometimes,
why so little women want to get into it.

~~~
dTal
Sexist -> awkward -> long hair is quite a series of leaps, and I'm mighty
curious as to the underlying mental model. You appear to be implying that
women might not want to go into IT because the men are unattractive. But
unattractive is not the same as hostile. If you _enjoy_ something, ugly people
won't keep you away.

Of note is that the percentage of open source programmers who are women is
half that of the broader industry, despite open source programming generally
involving less face-to-face interaction. Surely, if women were scared away by
ugly creepy nerds, the safety from behind a screen and absence of compelled
personal interaction would tend to bring them out? It would seem to be
suggestive that far fewer women enjoy doing that sort of thing for fun.

Incidentally, we have a nursing shortage. The incidence of male nurses is
similarly low to female programmers. I find it amusing that no one hand wrings
about this, or would dare make comments like "maybe men don't want to be
nurses because nurses are ugly".

~~~
stakhanov
...I agree. I find it disturbing, how quick women are to bring up notions like
"awkward" and "creepy" in discussions such as this. 80% of "awkward" is about
social interactions unfolding in a way that are outside the norm. 80% of
"creepy" is about being unattractive. Not being socialized to conform with the
norms is mostly a function of your childhood upbringing. Not being attractive
is a function of your genes. Both are elements of a destiny that is cast upon
you from outside and not within your control, like what gender you are born
into.

I don't see at all how an environment full of unattractive and not well-
socialized people create an environment that is in any way hostile to women.

But _superficial_ people who, when female, will play the feminism card against
people who happen to be unattractive and not well-socialized _do_ create a
hostile work environment for the latter group.

~~~
hutzlibu
"Not being attractive is a function of your genes"

No. Genes play a role, but attractiveness is not so much about looks as it is
about confidence and self esteem (and smell, of course).

I was considered very ugly in my youth. And yes, I compensated with computers.
I did not got much experience with girls in teenage years.

Then I traveled, studied and grew in my mind and confidence.

And today, well, lets just say, sometimes I am still confused, when very
attractive women flirt with me, as my old me would have considered them to be
way out of league.

Now I know how to play the game, so to say, but in the beginning, I know I
hurt quite some feelings and was probably considered arrogant, when I simply
did not know how to respond.

So, I got out of the basement. But:

"I don't see at all how an environment full of unattractive and not well-
socialized people create an environment that is in any way hostile to women."

many nerds never did. They long for women, but never learned the game and
sometimes think, they are too ugly etc. bullshit.

So when you have lots of men with unfullfiled desires and weak confidence or
knowledge regarding women ... then yes, they act awkward towards women. They
would like to bond, but don't knowmhow and think they never can. So not
hostile, but awkward, so quite some women feel uncomfortable and rather leave.

Now to be clear, no, not every IT nerd is like this. But too many. I was one
of them once.

~~~
stakhanov
...actually, the stuff you are saying is _precisely_ the kind of thinking that
will turn somebody who is merely unattractive into somebody who is creepy as
hell.

Exhibit A: Physical unattractiveness pairing off with _acting_ like you're not
unattractive, perhaps because of some misguided Disney-movie philosophy about
how self-confidence makes you attractive. Somebody acting like Johnny Depp
when they look like Patton Oswalt is pretty much the definition of creepy,
while somebody acting like Patton Oswalt when they look like Patton Oswalt may
be perfectly acceptable.

Exhibit B: Up until this point of the conversation, attractive/unattractive
was in reference to the presence/absence of factors that make women
uncomfortable when being around you, which does not really extend very far
into the sexual realm. And all of a sudden you start talking about bonding,
longing, unfulfilled desires, flirting, playing the game, hurt feelings, etc.
That is _precisely_ what women want men in the workplace to steer clear of,
when they look like Patton Oswalt.

I rest my case.

~~~
hutzlibu
You missunderstood most of it, but you are correct:

It is even more creepy, when someone "acts" like looking good, when he
actually believes inside, he does not.

But when someone believes he looks good and feels actually good in his body,
no matter the weight fot example, then this person does look good. (to most
people) But that does not mean, that suddenly everyone wants to have sex with
him or her.

You seem to took the hollywood definition, that attractiveness is objectivly
measurable on a linear scale. With sexiest woman toplist etc. That is
bullshit. There are general things if course, like healthy body and mind, but
attractiveness is highly subjectiv. Eastern areas for example love fat women.
Weetern not so much (in general)

And I have seen really "ugly" men (by common standard) with very beautiful
women in true love. Because the men had confidence amd strenght and knew is
way around in this crazy world and the women loved that strength to feel save.

------
fffjdtcsebj
Last year my main competitor went on a diversity hire drive. After hiring a
bunch they tried to fire one of them due to poor performance. It ended up as a
legal battle that is still ongoing. A number of the the other diversity hires
got the message that they were now unfirable and decided to start slacking off
as well. Now work there is pretty much frozen and they're bleeding customers.
Im told they're 6 months away from mass layoffs.

This company dominated my industry. I always planned on the taillight
following strategy where you follow a leading company and wait for them to
screw up. I'm now happily taking full advantage of their situation.

I actually have a way more 'diverse' staff. I offshored the work (and myself)
to a non-white country where for a weird historical reason this work was
mostly done by women. The main difference is that they're not a protected
class here so I don't have to worry about lawsuits.

The most lucrative customers will only buy American so once my competitor goes
under I'll open up a US office which will mean exposure to US laws but by that
stage I'll be ready to package the company off and sell it to someone else to
worry about.

~~~
teachrdan
I want to apply the principal of generosity here, but the fact that your post
perfectly illustrates the alleged perils of hiring non-white or Asian men--
from a new account no less!--makes me wonder if anything resembling this story
ever happened. Then again, everything in your narrative is so vague it's
literally impossible to disprove.

~~~
astura
Do people really know such detailed information of the HR issues of their
competitors?

Plus it just sounds like a shit post - "You can't hire black people, they'll
just slack off and sue you when you fire them."

------
peteretep
> Not just Facebook, but any targeted advertising platform that can target
> based on demographic could do this.

I'd like to point out that specifically you can NOT do this on Facebook any
more, or at least not if Facebook find it out. They make you mark your ads as
being job posts, and remove demographic targeting from that.

The headline here is irritating, because the headline being shown is two years
old. The headline should be the second half of it, which is:

"After two years the Federal Government confirms demographic advertising of
jobs is illegal"

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Seems pointless to me. What are they gonna do, hire those folks they meant to
exclude anyway when they show up?

~~~
black_puppydog
While we're at it: why bother with any sort of anti-discrimination effort?
Haters' gonna hate after all. /s

~~~
hutzlibu
There is a difference between accepting discrimination, or trying to enforce
antidiscrimination. Make such things open, talk and discuss about it, yes! But
when you discriminate to counter discrimination for example, than I believe
something went wrong.

------
DoreenMichele
I have mixed feelings about this. I am absolutely aware this can be a means to
intentionally exclude specific groups due to prejudice and can be a polite way
to do terrible things. I get that.

But the reality is that the modern world seems to seriously suck at figuring
out how to help people find the right kind of job for themselves or help
employers find the right people for the job. I keep thinking "Surely, there
must be a better way than what we are doing currently."

Maybe if we worked on solving that issue we would see less of this issue. Like
if it is a job for writing HTML and you write HTML, there are ways to find you
based on that and it won't matter what your gender or age is.

~~~
kjs3
The "modern world" sucks at figuring out how to help people find the right
kind of job for one of two reasons:

1) they keep thinking about gender and age as qualifiers for jobs for which
those factors have absolutely zero relevance (girls are bad at math! Old
people can't learn new things!), or

2) They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job
(girls will just get pregnant and leave! oldster can only do Cobol, they'll
never learn Python!).

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job
> (girls will just get pregnant and leave!_

This is not a delusion, and it's a thing commonly talked about in my country
(Poland). It's not just about that girls will get pregnant and leave - it'll
be that girls will get pregnant and out of the sudden[0] go on paid maternity
leave, which they can extend to a year, during which you have to keep their
position open, after which you can't legally fire them even if you've already
found a replacement, and there are many women[1] who plan another pregnancy
just after the leave period ends, in order to extend their employment period
by another two years. The incentive here is that health leave and maternity
leave both count as employment, so they don't have a break in years of
employment on their CV (and both are paid, too).

Overall effect of our legal landscape makes companies prefer men over women,
and/or prefer employment contracts that don't offer these legal guarantees,
and there's always noise being made whenever our government (which is
currently pro-family) starts talking about adjustments that would extend some
protections to those other work contract types.

(Now I'm not saying this to justify the bias in general, but just to point out
that there are real economic pressures in play that do get considered by the
employers.)

\--

[0] - You don't have a "notice period" on maternity live; if a doctor decides
there are concerns about the health of a mother or a child, your employee can
just give you the doctor's note and stop coming to work.

[1] - And I've personally heard parents encouraging their daughters to do
that. It seems to be a common theme, at least among the less well-off parts of
our population. The boss-employee relationship is pretty antagonistic.

~~~
DoreenMichele
This is actually a hard problem to genuinely solve. I don't know what the
solution is, but I'm not really happy with the current way we typically talk
about such things, which often amounts to denying that such issues exist.

You can't solve problems while pretending they don't exist and making it
Verboten to speak of them.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Exactly.

Beyond inertia of the traditional family model, there are real biological
constraints that you can't bulldoze with calls to equality - pregnancy is
taxing on the body, childbirth doubly so, the mother needs time to recover,
and she's arguably the more important parent in early stages of a child's
life. You can't e.g. declare equal amount of childbirth leave for both genders
and call it a day.

(Though equal, paid mandatory leave for _both_ parents would probably be
fairer _and_ also more beneficial for the child.)

I don't have first clue what the optimal, or "most fair", way of equalizing
career prospects in context of childbirth is. But as you write, we can't reach
it if people are pretending that the problem doesn't exist. And in context of
companies, that means realizing employers aren't discriminating here out of
spite or evil nature, but because there are economical considerations in play,
and with them comes market pressure.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Thank you for leaving substantive and reasoned comments on the topic.

------
manigandham
The simple question is: Does everyone have an equal opportunity to this
position or not? If you can't even see the ads then the answer is no, and so
it's a violation.

If there were different ads for different groups but everyone still had the
opportunity to see, apply and acquire the position then it's fair game.

Perhaps Facebook could improve job ads to allow for more specific targeting
but always have a fallback ad in that campaign for any non-targeted users.
This would help employers without excluding anyone.

~~~
WomanCanCode
I agree. As a female software developer, I would like to see those ads so I
can get better jobs. If I don't even see the ads, then I would not even know
about opportunity. Without opportunity, I cannot really progress.

If only men see the ads, apply jobs and get interviews, then the employers may
think that they shouldn't advertise to women. This is just circular thinking.

~~~
AdrianB1
Not in the steel mill in my town: no woman ever applied in 50 years, why spend
money on advertising to them? Nobody rejects female applicants (they don't
reject practically anybody), but no woman wants to work there, they can barely
find men. Same with any highway construction site: there is no woman in the
entire country, the working conditions are too harsh. They accept anyone
willing to work (there is much more demand than supply), but no woman applied.
Why spend good money on meaningless advertising?

~~~
pmyteh
In addition to wanting to work in a steel mill, you'd have to want to be the
_only woman in a steel mill_ , which adds an additional layer of difficulties
to what is already a difficult job. Likewise men in unpleasant female-coded
jobs like cleaning.

I was a male typist for a while when I was at university. I found the weird
experience of breaking gender roles quite entertaining, but it was definitely
an addition to the usual do-work-and-get-paid deal. And secretarial work is
not intrinsically unpleasant, so I was already doing better than most people
in my position.

FWIW there are women on highway construction sites in the UK. Not many
(construction as a whole is very male) but not none. I think the only industry
which is entirely male here is mining, and that's because of a 19th Century
law prohibiting women and children from doing it.

~~~
kamaal
>>you'd have to want to be the only woman in a steel mill

I guess that's the question being asked here. Why would that one woman be the
only woman in the steel mill. Why aren't thousands of women rushing to work at
steel mills, or in war fronts, or in coal mines, or in any other stereotypical
male dominated jobs. And you can't even blame this on some modern world
conspiracy. These things have been true throughout history across times and
cultures.

The answer to that question is simple. Women are under represented but they
are definitely far more cleverer than men. Once you prove you are likely to
die from cave ins or lung disease in a mine, or that you are almost assured to
get killed in a war, that fact now begins to itself act as a filter as to who
wishes to sign up and who doesn't. You have to be stupid and brave beyond
belief, to sign up for this kind of stuff. But then what happens is those
people who fight wars, eventually dictate politics and positions of power.
This ain't exactly a grand conspiracy. But millions of men have to die in
battles for a few to be in power and become Generals/Rulers. So the process is
largely self sustaining. You can chose to break this, then eventually you face
a stronger army and get eliminated.

This is where problems in software show up too. For years we have talked about
open source work being unpaid labor. Now which _intelligent_ person man or
woman would sign up for this? So now you see if there is no gate keeping, no
criteria apart from plain merit, ability to work and contribute code. Then the
biggest bottleneck is you yourself. The fact that awkward nerds dominate this
area is because you have to be that crazy and stupid enough to work for free
building things for others. Eventually some crazy nerds will indeed write
Linux or Perl or Emacs. Again its not exactly conspiracy. But it's a kind of
brutal filter.

In a way men are stupid, but that kind of stupidity leads to a better
positions on the very long term, because last ones standing hold positions of
power over whatever is left. But in the process millions of men have to suffer
in wars, refugee zones, mines and highway labor to make it happen.

------
rjf72
I understand the reason some people are upset with this, but one issue I find
interesting is that this is exactly how 'fair' advertising works, but
implicitly.

For instance if I advertise a position in, as some random example, Popular
Mechanics, I'm going to get an _extremely_ biased sample. And I'm putting my
position there specifically because I want to appeal to that demographic. This
is also why, for instance, in times past if you stayed at home and watched
broadcast television there would be a disproportionate number of ads for
things such as tampons, diapers (adult and child alike), and job injury
lawyers. It was targeting the demographic watching television at that time.

Perhaps one fair solution here would be an opt-in demographic profile
override. What a mouth full. What I mean is that if you want, you can require
Facebook to set your demographics to whatever you like. In other words,
imagine you're a woman and you want to be shown ads targeting men, well you
can opt-in to require your account profile to be a hit for man or woman.

The curious thing is that I imagine almost nobody would actually choose to
opt-in there. It'd probably be more used as a protest tool to destroy the
value of advertising (by large numbers of people opting into everything), than
a tool to get more ads you're interested in. Can't say I'm particularly upset
by that outcome though.

------
cryptozeus
All this will do is force companies which are not open to hiring older people
and women will have to spend money interviewing them. They will still reject
them and waste everyone’s time.

~~~
unionpivo
So the solution is to what, just look away and shrug ?

It's a process, you move goal posts one tiny step at a time and eventually it
will become less and less acceptable.

~~~
repolfx
Don't even look away. Just accept that people do differ by birth
characteristics and that there are often legitimate reasons to discriminate
based on those factors. There's no shame in that.

Look at firefighters. To get a female firefighter in New York they had to
lower the strength tests. Those tests were calibrated to be able to carry
people out of a burning building. Do you really want a 'process' that one tiny
step at a time leads to people eventually burning to death because their
rescuer was a tiny 5ft girl who couldn't lift them?

[https://nypost.com/2015/05/03/woman-to-become-ny-
firefighter...](https://nypost.com/2015/05/03/woman-to-become-ny-firefighter-
despite-failing-crucial-fitness-test/)

Or more prosaically, do you think men should be lingerie models? Or people too
old to run should be hired to take care of very young children?

~~~
unionpivo
I Disagree with you on the word "often". There are far many jobs where
physical body doesn't matter (and even there, you wont accept fat young guy
either, so you might as well just list what do you expect candidate to be able
to preform), than those that do.

Now lets look at a story in question:

> In the latest rulings, the EEOC cited four companies for age discrimination:
> > Capital One, Edwards Jones, Enterprise Holdings and DriveTime Automotive
> Group. > Three companies were cited for discrimination by both age and
> gender: Nebraska Furniture Mart, > Renewal by Andersen LLC and Sandhills
> Publishing Company.

No firefighters, no lingerie models ( I thought there were male underwear
models).

As far as who do I expect to become firefighter ? Anyone who can do the job.
If it means only males can do the job (I have no idea hoe true that is), I am
fine with that exception. But if there is a woman who can lift just as much as
average firefighter, and want to do the job, why would you prevent her from
doing it ?

~~~
repolfx
_You_ may expect that about firefighters, but people with the same definition
of progress as you see that as a problem to be solved by lowering the bar.

I think you're also drawing a rather arbitrary line here, based on assuming
the differences between young/old/male/female are purely physical. But that's
clearly not the case. If you're looking for a salesperson for your motorbike
store, you'll _probably_ have more luck fishing amongst men than women and
that's not discrimination unless your job ad literally says "no women
allowed".

That said, I do agree programming is not a job where there's any obvious way
or reason to do such targeting. But presumably these companies had reasons for
making those choices. Why don't we hear their side of the story?

------
gnicholas
Could these legal arguments be extended to lookalike audiences that are built
off of email lists that have a gender imbalance? That is, imagine I go to a
university to recruit, and I talk with 200 male students and 10 female
students. I then take their email addresses and make a lookalike audience to
advertise my jobs to. Could that be challenged on the grounds that I am trying
to advertise to male students? What if I don't know what goes into the
algorithm of creating lookalike audiences — for example, how important gender
is versus interests.

~~~
throwawayjava
The ad must have discriminatory _intent_ [1]. So if you're selecting
candidates with a black box ML model and you didn't explicitly include
racial/gender preferences...

But "the algorithm was sexist, not me" is probably going to be a losing
argument in any court case.

[1] Well, not entirely, but that's another can of worms.

~~~
gnicholas
Yeah, I was asking what the requisite intent is. Is it The intent to knowingly
discriminate, intent to do the thing that is discriminatory (a lesser
standard), or merely a disparate impact (which does not require any particular
state of mind)?

Edited for clarity

~~~
shkkmo
Disparate impact (without valid justification) and discriminatory intent are
both illegal.

------
mcguire
A linked article has examples.

[https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-
disc...](https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-
discrimination-housing-race-sex-national-origin)

Here's one:
[https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20171121-faceb...](https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20171121-facebook-
judaism.jpg)

------
donmatito
I came to read "and what about the men? Men are discriminated against too",
was not disappointed

------
foobar1962
Posting a job on social media -- and not dedicated job sites -- is already
reducing the number of people likely to see the listing. A lot of people don't
use social media.

I did a digital marketing course and have met a few digital marketers. When
asked if they use social media themselves, most if not all answer "oh GOD no."

~~~
underwater
You can choose whether to use social media or not. You can't choose your
gender.

------
slics
From the comments below on testing one’s experience, I don’t think that there
is a way to actually test one’s soft skill experience, and if they are the
right candidate for the job, other than leveraging the networking aspect for
recommending a candidate for a job.

One important requirement for a senior executive job these days is their Soft
Skills. If you can find a way to measure that, well you have solved a major
issue.

------
tdurden
So does this mean that targeted ads are now considered discrimination?

~~~
yardie
Yes. If you are, for example, placing rental or property ads that filter by
race, age, or gender that is the official description of it.

~~~
chii
and yet, by having a profile of the user, it is quite possible to "easily"
find proxies for the above traits, and target those proxies instead, and thus
dodge the legality issue. For example, using income.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Does that really dodge the legal issue?

I thought it had been shown that using proxies to discriminate is still
illegal if the intention was to discriminate against a protected class.

~~~
throwawayjava
It dodges the legal issue if you're very careful with your paper trail and get
a sympathetic jury.

You won't get a sympathetic jury. People don't have a lot of empathy for
algorithms. Maybe empathy for the people who write them, and then only maybe.
But you'll be up against a huge slate of expert witnesses explaining how we
already have lots of open sourced methods for teasing out these sorts of
indirect indicators.

~~~
shkkmo
The paper trail won't matter if your "accidentally" discriminatory policies
are not directly related to the position you are hiring for. It is the effect
of the employment policies that matter under US law.

> The laws enforced by EEOC prohibit an employer or other covered entity from
> using neutral employment policies and practices that have a
> disproportionately negative effect on applicants or employees of a
> particular race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual
> orientation, and pregnancy), or national origin, or on an individual with a
> disability or class of individuals with disabilities, if the polices or
> practices at issue are not job-related and necessary to the operation of the
> business. [0]

[0]
[https://www.eeoc.gov//laws/practices/](https://www.eeoc.gov//laws/practices/)

------
x0x0
Wow, I didn't expect to see CapitalOne or Edward Jones on that list. I kind of
figured it would be a bunch of smaller companies that were either ignorant of
the law or, more likely, used to playing fast and loose without consequences.

~~~
macspoofing
I'm not sure if there was anything deliberate here. It's possible the
companies targeted the jobs ads with factors or attributes that were
correlated with younger men by the Facebook algorithm.

~~~
deogeo
Being deliberate is not required:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact)

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> “Where a disparate impact is shown, the plaintiff can prevail without the
> necessity of showing intentional discrimination unless the defendant
> employer demonstrates that the practice or policy in question has a
> demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job in question.[3]
> This is the "business necessity" defense.[1]”

I wonder if you could argue that advertising in a particular way is a business
necessity because without doing so, the business cannot maintain competitive
viability in reaching necessary candidates.

Just for a devil’s advocate example, suppose that travelling to university
recruiting fairs to recruit for computer science job listings has a disparate
impact against female candidates, because the gender composition of university
programs in computer science are heavily skewed towards male applicants.

But university program graduates may be the only qualified type of candidate
for the position, so simply not targeting candidates in the male-
overrepresented way (i.e. not attending these university job fairs) would be
debilitating and hugely damaging for employers who require those qualified
candidates to be competitive in the market.

~~~
shkkmo
You can have an employment policy that favors CS grads when hiring programmers
because, while the policy is effectively discriminatory, you can show that it
directly relates to the job being hired for.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
It seems this would easily extend to many more types of job recruitment
targeting then too, no? Or at least targeting job ads seems like it would be
done for the exact same reasons as favoring CS grads in recruitment, until
clearly proven otherwise?

------
WomanCanCode
When I was younger (unmarried and no kids), I could work 11 hours in the
office as a software developer. And that translate to 55 hours a week minimum.
But now I just work 9.5 hours a day. I would love to work 8 hours, but based
on my experience you really need to work as much as you can get so you can
have a “good” daily stand-up report. I wish I could have a better work and
life balance … but when you are a software engineer, you can't turn off your
programming brain. The problem will be in your mind even if you leave the
office, sadly

~~~
dlp211
Stop giving your employer free labor.

------
robk
Why would employers not target women?

~~~
AdrianB1
At the steel mill where several of my cousins worked there was never, ever a
female applicant for positions on the factory floor, in 50 years. Why pay for
adds that nobody will care for?

Same for kindergartens in my country, there is no male care taker (not sure
what is the right name, it is not a teaching position) in the entire country.
Why advertise it to men?

If you want to hire junior developers, for example, why pay adds to people
over 50 years old? Chances they will never apply for a junior position in the
field.

------
lonelappde
Facebook studies every details of its users lives, so why on Earth is
targeting job are by gender an effective choice? Is all that other behavioral
data useless for targeting? Is personalized advertising a fraudulent industry?

------
undefined3840
The dirty secret of hiring is that employers are always thinking about cost,
but how many employees out there think of themselves as a cost to a bottom
line? Not many.

The most exploitable tech workers are young, single, males on H1-b visas. They
will take a low salary and essentially be enslaved to their job because
getting fired means getting kicked out of the country.

Old workers and women are more “expensive” because they use more healthcare
than young single males. We must totally disconnect employers from healthcare
once and for all.

We must also reform the H1-b system and stop employers from having so much
leverage over vulnerable employees due to their visa status.

Point is, it’s not as if employers think young men are superior talents to
women or older workers, it’s that they are by far the cheapest and most
exploitable. We need to remove these incentives (or disincentives) that
distort the hiring process and allow these discriminatory behaviors to bubble
up in the first place.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Older workers will still demand to be paid more than younger workers, since
they have more experience.

~~~
kjs3
Well....they don't, per se, _demand_ it. They are worth it because they have
more experience. The issue is that even the ones who will accept less than
their worth aren't considered because of various biases that have nothing to
do with their ability to do the job.

------
eloff
Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but:

If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get
much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because
they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking,
when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software
engineers. Not because they're less capable, but because there's less of them
as a percentage of the population. I shouldn't have the government mandating
that I can't tune my advertising campaign for ROI, which is basically the only
point of running one if the first place.

However, on the other side of the coin that's pretty unfair because clearly
there are good software engineers in those demographics and I'd be excluding
them to save money.

I think both alternatives suck in different ways, but as a business I'd
probably choose ROI over fair. It's all pretty hypothetical though, because
Facebook ads are probably one of the worst ways I can think of to find
candidates.

~~~
dangus
“It’s not cost efficient” isn’t a valid reason to discriminate against people,
if you ask me.

An analogy to your justification: the most cost efficient thing to do with
hazardous chemicals is to dump them down the drain.

~~~
conanbatt
> “It’s not cost efficient” isn’t a valid reason to discriminate against
> people, if you ask me.

It's literally the perfect reason to do discrimination. It is just like
discriminating for having work experience, education, demonstrably market
skills, etc.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
We have decided as nations and societies that some forms of economic
discrimination are too damaging to permit. The details vary, but typically the
things we can't easily change: race, nationality, age etc. Such discrimination
is generally outlawed.

Someone lacking relevant market skills or education etc can go out and fix
that.

~~~
conanbatt
> The details vary, but typically the things we can't easily change: race,
> nationality, age etc. Such discrimination is generally outlawed.

Also generally perpretrated, by the same body that bans it.

A great beauty about human beings is that they have a natural tendency to find
what is best for them and their communities in spite of legalities that
attempt to distort reality.

In any case, what you are ascribing as unlawful discrimination is absolutely
lawful and you would be naive to believe that there were castings for white
asian geriatric women for the role of Black Panther to abide a law about the
positively-discriminated groups you mention.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Thankfully for society, countries manage to make common sense exceptions to
those laws in a very limited number of circumstances.

Movies and TV tend to be among the worst for discrimination as a result.

------
ga-vu
I see ProPublica is rehashing everyone's articles as their own these days.

Didn't Gizmodo prove this and various other abuses a few years back?

~~~
aVx1uyD5pYWW
ProPublica, and in particular this reporter, has been doing a lot of original
research on facebook's abuses in the past few years.

For instance, they started this project to collect facebook ads:
[https://projects.propublica.org/facebook-
ads/](https://projects.propublica.org/facebook-ads/)

See also this joint investigation by the New York Times and ProPublica:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/business/facebook-job-
ads...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/business/facebook-job-ads.html)

~~~
ga-vu
Hi there, reporter!

------
aussieguy1234
Not just Facebook, but any targeted advertising platform that can target based
on demographic could do this.

Its not the first example of unethical behaviour using this technology.
Alcohol gets targeted to Alcholics, Gambling gets targets to problem gamblers.

Targeted advertising for certain purposes should be illegal, including
employment ads, alcohol ads, gambing ads and any kind of political ad. There's
just too many ways it can go wrong with these kinds of ads.

~~~
erichocean
Or we could outright ban advertising everywhere, for any reason, full stop.

~~~
tnel77
When someone says “full stop,” I like to wonder if they think that that makes
their belief more correct than it otherwise would have been interpreted.

~~~
luckylion
I tend to read it as "and I don't intend to have any exceptions". More as a
statement setting the limits of their claim/suggestion than "and this is not
to be discussed".

------
dlphn___xyz
this doesnt seem like a bad thing imo - tech has always favors young
applicants

~~~
kjs3
You're going to age too. Don't wait until employers say "screw you" before you
care.

------
sdfmmkmsdfmk
Why force businesses to waste money on advertising to and interviewing people
they don't want to hire?

At the end of the day, some person will get a job. Why is it better if a woman
or old person gets the job? Enforcing diversity hiring practices is not
creating more jobs for anyone (except diversity advisors, granted). On the
contrary, it increases the cost of doing business, which is likely to reduce
demand for employees.

~~~
ptah
most studies show that diversity leads to increased productivity and
innovation. it actually reduces the cost of doing business significantly. this
is the only reason big corporates are doing it as they are purely driven by
their bottom line

------
paulpauper
it's called ad targeting. If the govt. wants to pay for those low converting
clicks/impressions, then i'm sure they, these employers, will be glad to serve
ads to everyone.

~~~
deogeo
The government doesn't pay for the cost of unleaded gasoline/work safety
standards/food safety/building codes - why should this case be different?

------
lifeisstillgood
This is huge, but in a way perhaps not obvious. I am trying to define a thing
called a programmable company - it's where all the actions a company can make
are scripted / scriptable - and weirdly it's what the law assumes exists right
now - that a company has a controlling mind.

I am trying to say that automation and governance belong hand in hand.

