> 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.
The challenge is to compel belief that unequal gender distribution across professions creates a systemic harm.
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.
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.
If it's NOT harm, then it should be legal for job boards to only show positions to the desired gender, right?
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.
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.
At least according to “Is It Discriminatory to Advertise Job Opportunities on Facebook?”, https://www.thatcherlaw.com/blog/2022/12/is-it-discriminator...
Also, unless the golf club is discriminating, female golfers are just as able to see the ad -vs- male golfers.
So it's not an individual's revealed preferences, it's a group's revealed preferences. And that's where the discrimination comes in.
Unless somebody says explicitly "no women", there is no discrimination in my opinion.
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.
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.
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.
Ie. No content recommendations on reddit, tikok, facebook, youtube, amazon, twiter, etc.
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.
Sounds like a win to me.
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.
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.
If the law is nonsensical or harmful, it can and should be changed.
Still a yes from me. I see no reason to change the law to prevents people from being discriminated against in employment opportunities, And that was implied in my comment. I was not “fobbing” to the current laws, I was saying, this is illegal and for good reason.
Whether intentional or not, you cannot advertise a job to only certain people based on targeting by a protected characteristic.
You may not like it, but you haven’t proven to me that the law is nonsensical. I’m actually a little skeptical you are able to describe the current law you wish to change - see: Chesterton’s Fence.
To clarify, my question was specifically about the case where you could prove that the ad system could not possibly target based on a protected characteristic (gender, in this example). The only thing the ad system could learn is a user's interest in ads for a job.
An ad system like this will show more ads to the people who are interested in them and less to the people who are not. In the case when there is a genuine difference in job interest along gender lines, the "more interested" and "less interested" groups will just happen to have different gender profiles.
So my question was: In these circumstances, if the system gives more ads for the job to the people who want them and less to the people who do not, is that gender discrimination?
EDITED TO ADD: To further clarify: I think you're arguing that if there are observable differences in job ad rates along gender lines, then it follows that the ad system is, in fact, targeting based on gender. I constructed this example to rule out that possibility: The ad system cannot target -- or take any action -- based on gender. All it knows is which users are interested in ads for a job.
Is Facebook selecting the targeted groups or delivering ads to them?
Since all you offered were your feelings, there isn't anything of substance to follow up on beyond that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think we know this, it is more of a fervent wish.
I do understand that you think otherwise, I have met many people who see things differently.
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.
I don't judge things by economic effectiveness; slavery was economically effective at one time but it was still wrong.
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.
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.
We already been through this. It's not ancient history
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.
> 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?
What it suggested was people to actually learn something about the world around them. Because we literally have jobs that at one point started as diverse/female dominated and then marketed exclusively at males. For example, IT/programming.
Also, a lot of "traditional" roles don't need additional algorithmic biases to stay the same.
> 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.)
"What you eventually get" suggests that using algorithms leads to gender discrepancies. I'm saying gender discrepancies existed long prior to the algorithms. I'm not saying gender discrepancies are good (although I do think they are inevitable), I'm just saying they are the cause, rather than the effect, of the algorithm.
Why do we want to perpetuate biases without a chance to allow it to potentially be corrected?
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.
Are those not goals of yours?
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?
Or did I miss obvious sarcasm?
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.
You've written twice in this thread that you'd need to ban any kind of content recommendation system. Is that what you're advocating for? Your comments read to me as the opposite - you're saying that the only way to 100% solve this issue is by banning any recommendation system, so we shouldn't do anything instead.
This is, of course, not how we treat almost any facet of our society. No law covers 100% of cases, yet we're fine implementing new laws if they improve the situation. Why can't we do the same here?
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?
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.
If you cannot advertise without breaking the law, do not advertise. There are plenty of other platforms which do it right.
Why is this not as simple as going to a job board and searching for the job that you want?
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?
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.
1. not everyone is aware of all the opportunities available on the market, e.g. when skillset is matching different type of the job people have not considered
2. …or where to find them, because there are many job boards and not everything even lands on them
3. …or that they should look for them at certain moment of time
Push ads address all 3 problems, reaching e.g. those who are employed and not actively looking, but open to change. If a man gets that ad, but a woman not, it means that that man spent zero time to find that opportunity and woman may not even find it in active search. Effectively they pay different costs for getting a better job.
So the hypothesis is that there are jobs that people will pay money to advertise for but won't place on a free job board to be found by interested parties?
There also seems to be a hypothesis that someone will click on an ad for a job, even if they don't realize they have the skills for it, where they won't search for a job that they don't realize they don't have the skills for. Am I understanding?
Do we have any examples to demonstrate this? All seems like an incredibly weak argument. Like, who was harmed by this? There was somebody that was a woman that wanted to be a mechanic and she couldn't because she didn't get a Facebook ad for it? That's what we're talking about, 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.
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.
> In Germany all job postings explicitly say „(m/w/d)“
Great, and what is actually stopping someone from only hiring men, or only hiring women? Putting "m/w/d" in a job posting is performative nonsense. Jobs are not granted automatically when you interview, they are discretionary. It is trivially easy for someone with hiring authority to not hire a woman because they are a woman, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise.
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.
What if they get mad because their wages aren't living wages? What then? Why shouldn't they be owed living wages or owed non-awful jobs?
Jobs do not grow on trees. They are not harvested from the ether. It is the responsibility of every individual to provide for their own needs. If that requires getting a job, so be it. But you can also create your own job(s). There is more than enough opportunity for every working age person to provide for the needs of others and get provision in return. That is what civilization should be ensuring, not pre-packaged "jobs".
Learn nuance, it's going to help you in life...
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/historic-decision-digita...
Put another way, what's the conversion rate shear between mechanic job listings between women and men?
Overall, agree with your take.
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.
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.
I'm sure that Officially Doesn't contribute to discrimination.
I don't think many people use it, though.
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.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
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.
amelius•3mo ago
macintux•3mo ago
dang•3mo ago
(macintux is correct about the char limit)