Google Has Been Allowing Advertisers to Exclude Nonbinary People from Seeing Job | Hacker News Reader

Google Has Been Allowing Advertisers to Exclude Nonbinary People from Seeing Job

themarkup.org

42 pointsatg_abhishek32 comments

To play devil's advocate, couldn't this just be a way of filtering out people who would likely be less committed to finding a job, or less likely to apply for one they saw in an ad?

From the article:

> Companies trying to run ads on YouTube or elsewhere on the web could direct Google not to show those ads to people of “unknown gender”—meaning people who have not identified themselves to Google as “male” or “female.”

Not allowing an "unknown gender" doesn't necessarily mean purposefully excluding nonbinary people. A better option would be to allow people to choose "nonbinary" as a gender, no?

Not that I'm defending Google's ad monopoly.

How does having a gender associated with your Google profile indicate being "committed" to finding a job?

I mean, I'm sure plenty of people have Youtube accounts for "shitposting" or listening to music that they don't fill out with much detailed information (myself included). On my main Youtube profile, I would include this information, and I would probably be more receptive to ads about jobs I see when using my main profile.

I'm saying this could well be more about filtering out people who have less information associated with their profile than filtering by "nonbinaryness."

1) People will self identify as anything. I worked for a survey agency. We had many people identify as an Apache Attack Helicopter on surveys. Played havok with the statistics.

2) Any company doing this is just asking for a discrimination lawsuit. Just because Google can show your ads only to single straight white men does not mean you should let them. Has no one stayed awake during diversity training at these companies?

I'm sympathetic to the cause here, but the bigger problem is that excluding "unknown" has value in the sense of "don't show my advertising to people that google can't track" or "people who aren't logged in and Google can't guess".

They could probably fix this by distinguishing between people who don't select a particular gender vs people who Google doesn't know anything about.

It does make me wonder if Google will devour itself with questions of: is targeted advertising to a particular gender or class sexist? racist? Using the definitions of those words as used by the average googler politic I think they may think that.

That is not something Google gets to decide. These questions are not new or unprecedented. There are laws around hiring specifically to prevent people from doing exactly what's happening here.

Google does get to decide it for advertising and that is their bread and butter

No, they don’t. The job advertisements you’re describing would be very clearly illegal. http://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices

> It is illegal for an employer to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for or discourages someone from applying for a job because of his or her race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy)…

> 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)…

For advertising they do - stop arguing against a point that isn’t being made. Posting job listings isn’t their ‘bread and butter’.

Sorry, I didn’t realize you were talking about advertising in general. But for the record, job listings are advertisements — they are indeed part of Google’s “bread and butter”.

Job advertisements are a type of advertisement and are what is being talked about here. General advertisement has nothing to do with the OP article, isn't legislated the same, and nobody is surprised about demographic limiting general advertisement.

My whole point in the original thread was - I wonder if this will spill out into general advertising too.

I don't think this is malicious. Even in the article it states that Google offered this targeting option because advertisers wanted it. Not necessarily defending them but I can definitely see why the option is there. It probably means just not able to be determined (i.e. null?)

Seems like Google made 2 mistakes with this actually: not separating "unspecified" from "other" in the targeting logic and blocking the targeting on these types of ads by individual entries instead of category.

If you want to have fun, ask your insurance company and/or PBM (ie Rx insurance company) how they handle this scenario :)

Not being shown yet another crappy ad sounds like a favour.

Otherwise, the extreme flexibility of Google ads is ripe for genuine discrimination: by age, income, place of living, hobby, profession etc. It’s basically their product!

Here in France most job advertisements specify H/F (for male or female) or use language for the job description that includes both feminine and masculine terms.

It had never occurred to me that any of these job posts were anything other than inclusive - but I imagine the authors of this article would disagree and suggest they are deliberately excluding non-binary persons.

I don't see a good solution here when language hasn't caught up with wokeness.

German companies used m/w or m/f. They use m/w/d or m/f/d now. Simple.

Interesting - the ‘d’ is for non-binary, or other gender? It seems an easy fix for the headline of a job post.

More of an issue is the language itself. The French language is slowly opening itself up to having a male and female word for different professions that used to be gendered one way or the other. We have ‘professeure’ for a female teacher along with the traditional ‘professeur’ for a male teacher. But we don’t have a job title for a non-gendered teacher. An advertisement for a 'professeur.e’ would still be exclusionary by the judgement of the article, wouldn’t it?

Divers is Germany's official category for other gender.

The article is about companies actually hiding ads from people who didn't pick male or female. We don't know how they would judge gendered titles in a gendered language.

Most German companies just put m/w/d after the gendered title.

It is not good or right, but non-binary people are probably not going to have a good time at FedEx or Dewey Pest Control. Seems like those companies may already know that and they were using the knobs they were given.

They are spending money on impressions, why waste them?

Of course, the better idea to not allow them to ignore those interested and eventually hire them and move slowly forward past the the present culture at those places.

What makes you think that? Nonbinary people are just like anyone else with the same range of interests, likes, dislikes, politics, worldview, etc.

This is actually somewhat novel - US regulation defending a right to not answer a question for a surveillance dossier. I identify as a straightforward binary, but still answer 'unknown' or garbage for anything I can, as I generally don't see how it's anyone's business.

That's a terrible clickbait title.

I'm wondering why this post has been flagged?

Google can do better here but .... gees I hate this way of trying to frame everything in the worst possible way.

Google had the option to filler out people who it didn't have data on. That's it. Then the person who wrote the article spins it as negative as possible .

Google has a very large number of nonbinary employees. Bringing up the issue I'm sure some work will work into fixing it, adding more options, but it didn't need to be so confrontational.

I'm also sure it's not as trivial to fix as it sounds. Let's say you want to market tampons. It's not unreasonable to only want to target "people who's body a tampon was designed for" (regardless of if there is some small segment of people what want to use tampons for other purposes). What should the filter for "people who's body a tampon was designed for" be? The shortcut for a century or so as been "female" in the "I have vagina" category, not the "I'm attracted to men" category.

Even if it's not body related, if your market research tells you that 98% of your market is women (say lipstick), it's not unreasonable to not want to waste money marking to everyone for that last 2% and as a result, wasting the time of the large male percentage of the population that has no interest in lipstick. There's nothing nefarious here.

Tangentially. This type of exclude/include issue comes up all over. On OkCupid for example, I can choose to match "atheists" but I can't not choose to match non-Christians. In other words I can select people in Set A but I can not select people Not in Set B. The problem is, at least where I live, the majority of people do not select a religion so if I check "Atheists" + "Agnostic" it filters out literally 99% of everyone. Where as, what I want to be able to do is filter out people who specifically choose certain religions since those people signaled they weren't a match for me.

Instead my only option is to check nothing and then have to manually go through the profiles and scroll down to see if they marked some religion. Since ~30-50% do that's a huge waste of time for me.

Similarly there are certain question answers I want to filter out. They might not have chosen a religion but they might have answered the question "How important is religion/God in your life?" as either "Extremely Important" or "Somewhat Important" which is basically tells me we aren't compatible. But, there's no way to filter out, only filter in, so if I add the filter in criteria then everyone who didn't answer the question is gone.

This is even more tedious to check than the previous since religion is surfaced on the main profile but these answers you have to dig through.

Maybe they are computer jobs

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