ACLU files charges against Facebook for targeting job ads to young males | Hacker News Reader

ACLU files charges against Facebook for targeting job ads to young males

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19 pointsguelo23 comments

Why on earth wouldn't someone looking for a job where 90% of the people are males advertise mainly to people that are also males? Also, I didn't know being advertised at was a civil liberty. I wish the ACLU would spend less time on inane things like this and more time on stuff that matters.

Totally! Given the demographics of their applicants, their ads should read "Men over 30 and women not need apply!". /s

You do realize that although no job ad has ever been worded that way, there actually are MANY job ads that specify "female applicants only" and more and more "POC only" (or "strongly preferred")?

I've never seen such ads in my entire engineering career. But if they do exist as you suggest, it must be a "bona fide occupational qualification" or it's not legal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...

Is access to employment is an "inane" concern? Is it moral, or legal, for employers to algorithmically exclude arbitrary classes from receiving or discovering job listings?

Consider expanding this sort of technique to monster/linkdin/glassdoor/etc so that you aren't shown job listings because it can be inferred that you are probably over 30, or Republican, for example.

It seems that ACLU wants to use this as a test case to clarify what is or isn't legal before this practice becomes a pervasive part of the employment market.

How is access to employment improved by making job ads more expensive?

Would you care to make a more detailed argument or proposal? I'm willing, in general, to be persuaded by a good argument, but you'll have to show your work. :)

Don't regulate job ads targeting at all, so that it's as cheap as possible to post a job ad and so that there are no burdens on websites that host job listings.

That's not really an argument. It's just a conclusion begging for some justification.

The justification of maximizing people's access to job listings is very evident in what I wrote.

That's a conclusion, not a justification. The very topic we are discussing is that ignoring regulation causes some classes of people to be excluded entirely from some job postings. You are arguing the opposite, which is fine - but you can't just claim that it's self evident.

If roofing job advertisers are forced to spend half of their budget on a demographic that objectively clicks through at a drastically lower rate, they will have to spend 2X more money to reach the same number of workers that they used to reach.

Making advertising those jobs on Facebook 2X more expensive is an incentive for those firms to revert to alternative hiring habits that are even more nepotistic, reducing overall access to employment.

> spend half of their budget on a demographic objectively clicks through at a drastically lower rate, they will have to spend 2X more money

This reasoning pre-supposes that only CPM-style ads are available, to the exclusion of CPC or CPA, but that seems unlikely on a platform as modern as FB.

Your first sentence seems mis-worded, but there are two answers to your question.

Firstly, it's unethical and morally abhorrent to discriminate on the basis of age, heritage, and gender in general employment markets.

Secondly, the laws exist making illegal these types of hiring discrimination because ethical behavior doesn't come naturally to many people making hiring decisions.

The very-sheltered may have never seen it, but there is a great deal of bigotry out there.

The history of these issues for workers is ugly and bloody. People died to get us to where we are today.

Hiring discrimination is not the same thing as advertising/outreach.

You are free to to apply to any company you want, and they are legally required to judge you on the basis of your skills (equality of opportunity). They are not legally required to hire you on the basis of any demographic you fall into (no equality of outcome).

If 60% of your workforce came from European universities, while 40% other universities -- are you required to advertise to them all equally? What if that 60% figure came about on its own, with no external influence on your part. Maybe they have more international renown for the skills your company just happens to desire? Would you spend the same advertising budget on both institutions?

Sometimes these things happen on their own, But pretending that the businesses doing outreach are 100% accountable for "SOLVING" every demographic composition is simply not vested in reality, especially when these things weren't necessarily broken in the first place.

Presuming bigotry can be in itself a form of intolerance -- we need to be careful!

> They are not legally required to hire you on the basis of any demographic you fall into (no equality of outcome).

Huh?

> But pretending that the businesses doing outreach are 100% accountable for "SOLVING" every demographic composition is simply not vested in reality

Uhh....

You're arguing against things none of the ancestors have argued.

You use an example (geographic location of a university), however that is not a protected class under US labor law.

> Presuming bigotry can be in itself a form of intolerance

There certainly are bigots running companies, and in hiring committees. Even in Enlightened Silicon Valley! Ignoring that fact is one of the reasons Facebook now faces a federal lawsuit with substantial merit.

Your comment reminds me of "Whites only" and "Coloreds Only" waterfountains. Except, men and women. They too, at the time, defended and dismissed the practice. As you have.

It was abhorrent then, and it is still abhorrent now.

Do you think they are doing this because they want as few women as possible apply for the job, or because they want to maximize the effectiveness of their ad spending? I know which one I'm betting on.

If I'm a nursing school, I'm spending 90% of my marketing dollars on advertising to 18-35 women. Anything else is a calculated attempt at capturing a new market (possibly to fulfill demographic quotas), not arbitrary spending to make sure every demographic on the planet sees the ad.

The goals of a society and individuals sometimes conflict. It's true, perhaps an organization could become somewhat more productive practicing discrimination.

Personally, I prefer a more level playing field even if it is a bit more expensive. We're rich enough to afford it.

You're 100% right, but a business exists first and foremost to make money. No business in their right mind whose customer base is 90% male is going to run an equal amount of ads on TLC as on ESPN. Why should jobs be different?

If I really want to be advertised products marketed to women, what do I do? Turn on TLC, or complain that ESPN isn't showing enough female-oriented ads?

Life isn't fair. Nothing is equal that isn't equal. We can do our best on an individual level but it's unreasonable to expect businesses to do anything more than treat applicants and employees of all demographics equally (which is an ongoing effort). Everything else is a statistic, and businesses will readily graze up against as many rules as possible. The checks and balances of this system is that when a business is caught blatantly discriminating, it turns into national news and they are punished financially.

The upside to this is that ethics and financial interests often align; businesses that are ethical have better public perception, and also attract better employees. Macrocosm and microcosm aligned.

If I wanted to go to nursing school as a male, I'm going to start researching, not wait for facebook to show me an ad.

The new, modern ACLU wants careful regulation of speech when it gets in the way of progressive goals.

I really don't see how the companies placing the ads, aren't going to get hammered for it. But Facebook is doing nothing illegal, unless the ads, were placed for jobs with facebook. Just as newspaper/radio/tv aren't required not to post job adverts that violate the EEOC's rules.

For clarity, According to the EEOC (https://www1.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm?renderforprin...)

Recruitment

It is also illegal for an employer to recruit new employees in a way that discriminates against them because of their race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

For example, an employer's reliance on word-of-mouth recruitment by its mostly Hispanic work force may violate the law if the result is that almost all new hires are Hispanic.

To play the devil's advocate, aren't there legitimate use cases for this?

e.g. you are paying men to be part of a test trial for a male contraceptive such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm... , which is still in the trial phases in the US. You're looking for individuals with gonads, and having those highly correlates with being male. Why would you spend ad budget on women's impressions for the above?

Whether that falls under "jobs" category is not clear to me.

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