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?
Sex is a federally protected class[1]. Discrimination in employment decisions based on any federally protected class is illegal, and can carry rather large fines.
Using a job board that explicitly discriminates based on a protected class is a very, very risky idea. If a member of the untargeted portion of the class (a male) sees a job ad there and is denied employment they have very good evidence for a sex discrimination lawsuit.
The next time I (male) am looking for a job, I will make a specific point of seeking out job advertisements targeted at women in tech and applying, just to see what happens.
Unfortunately, the Department of Justice chooses to not enforce this law when the offending objective is to hire anything but white males. It should be enforced equally.
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.
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?
I upvoted your comment because I think the reasoning reflects people's actual reasoning. That said, I don't think techy women can be described as metaphorically "poor" these days. Big tech firms are desperate for more women.
For women as a whole it's another issue, but very few are going to learn an entirely new skillset just because they saw an ad.
As someone pointed out further down the comment thread, we do not give out free food and housing exclusively to the demographic that has more poor people. Doing so would be inhumane and heartless.
> 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?
I suspect you probably know the reason (even if you disagree with it) and you're making a polemic point rather than genuinely asking this question.
If I'm mistaken then forgive me. In short - certain sectors have a very skewed gender bias and it's regarded as a good thing to try and correct for that.
Gender bias is when a company doesn't decide by anything relevant to the job (such as skills, quality or work discipline), but instead decided mostly by the sex. And this is happening. Female programmers are getting hired even when their skills/productivity/experience is way lower than male programmers.
When someone is sitting on you and you're punching up it can be seen as a fight for liberation, when you're sitting on someone and punching down it can be seen as violent oppression.
Because the goal may not be 'fair' for all individuals but instead 'equal' for groups of individuals, especially those who have been traditionally discriminated against.
It has to do with the philosophical point of what you’re trying to do, doesn’t it? When you target your job-advertising at groups who are minorities in your field of expertise, then you’re being inclusive from an equality point of view. On the other hand, if your job-advertising targets members of the majority, then you’re being exclusive.
The degree of “unfairness” is the same, but the goal isn’t “fairness” as such but rather equality. Whether we personally agree with forced equality or not is really beyond the point in a society that views inclusiveness as good and exclusion as bad.
Because it's a specialized channel where companies can specifically advertise their inclusiveness, which is important for a number of reasons.
First, we need to stem the losses of women in tech that happen due to the traditionally woman-hostile culture that has pervaded the industry for so long, and is only now beginning to recede. Women (and in fact all minority groups) get pushed out of the industry by hostile work environments. A specialized channel like this allows companies to say "We don't tolerate that, so come work for us." It allows them to tap a potentially huge labor force before it shrinks too much.
Second, markets like these offer a less stressful job search for marginalized groups, because they can have greater confidence that they won't get jerked around this time. It means that less women get so fed up that they quit, which means less time and effort is required to reach a critical mass where the momentum of women in tech begets more women in tech on its own.
This isn't about excluding men; it's about providing a more confidence-inducing hiring process for marginalized groups.
FYI: the more choices women have, the less like are they to choose IT. Nothing to do with "hostility".
Sitting for hours in front of the screen starring at code may not seem so appealing to everyone.
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.
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.
> 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"
A newly-public EEOC ruling resulting from investigative journalism around explicitly discriminatory hiring practices facilitated (and profited from) by one of the more morally-bankrupt technology companies of our time is announced, and your gripe is the journalists aren’t giving Facebook enough credit?
A lot of discrimination happened while Facebook hadn’t fixed the problem. Discrimination which Facebook profited from. Facebook decided to enter the job, credit and real estate ad markets, but didn’t care enough to think through the details.
Recent history has been Facebook et al being brazenly lawless, making money from it, and then getting away with a slap on the wrist. The government starting to show teeth is news, and stating their confirmed finding is a fair headline.
> and your gripe is the journalists aren’t giving Facebook enough credit?
My gripe is that the headline _as it currently is on HN_ is two years out of date, and that the real headline is "Government rules targeting job ads using demographics is illegal".
I think the idea here is to reduce ad spend rather than to discriminate, but it has the side effect of the latter.
You can be perfectly willing to hire a 55 year old female construction worker, but you’ll probably save money by only advertising construction jobs to men aged 20-50.
It depends. If the goal was to exclude women or old people no matter how qualified they are then you're right, they could just be excluded at a later stage. But if goal was to save money or reach more relevant people based on the assumption that there are fewer old people and women with necessary qualifications then they actually might hire them once they've applied.
Now I think about it, even in the first case it could make a difference. Rejecting an application from a real individual based on prejudice might be harder to do, due to a stronger feeling of wrongness, than just unchecking a box labelled "female".
As someone who is not really young anymore, I would prefer not being shown those ads. They are not going to hire me anyway when I show up and they see me so I am just going to waste my time... and even if they were somehow forced to hire me, I don't want to work with people who do not want work with me. Some problems cannot be illegalized away.
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.
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!).
> 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.
I'm glad you care about these things, but to say those are the only two reasons why we have trouble correctly matching people to fulfilling jobs is asinine.
What is your proof, that gender and age has zero relevance?
I believe, that yes, for example women of a certain age, have a high statistical chance of getting pregnant soon (or already are pregnant). That is very relevant. As they will suddenly be not avaiable anymore for quite some time. While the employer still hase obligations to them (don't know about US, but definitely in germany).
Now yes, the correct solution can't be to just exclude women of that age or prefer man. But the reality is, that this is happening a lot. And it sucks and is a hard problem for society in general, but I don't believe the mantra helps to exclaim the problem does not exist.
I feel like we might as well be honest that age has an impact on cognition. You do get slower at learning new things but valuable experience can be big, as someone said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20609100
Is it biased in a bad way? It’s really hard to measure someone’s ability to do a job, especially for a more senior role. Therefore, I feel comfortable hiring people recommended to me by others that I trust.
This is a great idea. What about a service that allows proctored skills tests for applicants? Like Sitepoint but with some additional verification layers.
Hiring managers would then pick a tech stack or set of skills they need, and matches would bubble up based on applicants in the area with the relevant skills.
The "culture fit" question could be another egg to crack. Who knows if interviews are the best way to figure that out...
Any process that attempts to “solve” the technical skills verification problem will not work unless it replaces the technical portion of the on-site interview. Otherwise, companies can still reject based on technical assessments in which case you’ve solved nothing. You’ve simply changed the shape of the hiring funnel.
Also, looking beyond the immediate need, companies would also need to understand that this only applies to very specific positions. You shouldn’t apply this to entry level, nor should you apply this to positions where the employee is expected to adapt quickly to changing tech stacks. What this leaves you with is contracting. You hire experts with a very specific skillset that you need that is verified by an agency. For everything else, there is still not a good generic solution.
I think even more generally, companies suck at ad targeting. Companies may have all the data in the world about their targets, but they don't particularly have the time nor the will nor the incentives to think about good segmentation, so they fall back to the "tried and true /s" age and gender segments.
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.
> 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.
Do these cases involve advertising positions that are not listed elsewhere? Because obviously no company can afford to reach everyone who might be interested in a position. I would agree that selective advertising would be much more of a problem if the positions are not listed on employers' websites.
I'm not sure if there is a perfect answer there. It might be best to scope it down to a certain medium and channel and say that all users on that channel have the ability to either see the ad or browse a directory of all listings.
If Facebook also had a jobs board that anyone can search and find ads where employers aren't paying for impressions then I think that would offset a targeted campaign to select groups.
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.
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?
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.
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.
So... good? If companies that reject good candidates for no good reason find themselves having higher hiring costs, they'll have to either reajust their hiring criteria or spend more than their competitors.
Sure, it sucks for the interviewees for now, but there's potential to make things better for everyone in the long term.
>Three companies were cited for discrimination by both age and gender: Nebraska Furniture Mart, Renewal by Andersen LLC
First two are presumably looking for manual laborers who can lift heavy furniture and install heavy windows.
I previously worked for a moving company and tried to help fill my vacancy when I left the company. We would have been happy to hire a woman who could move sofas and dressers all day in a safe and controlled manner. (The company had previously had one female employee). There just aren't that many of them out there. The resumes I got from women had no indication of manual labor in their work history (they were just shotgunning applications out to every recent job listing). They would have been rejected based on work history (just the same as men) if we weren't desperate. However the company was very short on labor and I called every applicant. None of the female applicants showed up for a working interview
>and Sandhills Publishing Company.
The third is a software company that forces its employees to wear a suit to work. So maybe they're stuck in an antiquated sexist mindset. Maybe they just realized 82% of CS majors are young men.
I do think it's good to remove discriminatory job ad placement, for the sake of that 18% of the population. But don't think for a minute that this will change the gender imbalance in certain industries. It's a pipeline problem.
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?
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.
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.
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)?
Yes, easily because only thing that is necessary (in the US) is the disparate effect of your employment policies (edit: and the relevancy of those policies to the position being filled):
> 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]
Readit News
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?
Because the one aims to reduce an imbalance in the workforce, which leads to a particular section being under represented.
Thwe other aims to increase an imbalance in the workforce, which leads to a particular section being under represented.
Some people believe that discrimination on the basis of race/sex/etc is bad. By that standard, discrimination in favor of women is also bad.
Other people believe that imbalance is bad, and thus discrimination should be used to counteract this.
IMO people with the second opinion probably shouldn't call what they dislike "discrimination".
Using a job board that explicitly discriminates based on a protected class is a very, very risky idea. If a member of the untargeted portion of the class (a male) sees a job ad there and is denied employment they have very good evidence for a sex discrimination lawsuit.
[1] https://content.next.westlaw.com/Document/Ibb0a38daef0511e28...
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.
For women as a whole it's another issue, but very few are going to learn an entirely new skillset just because they saw an ad.
If discrimination is THE issue, then woman specific job ads also needs to be banned.
Deleted Comment
I suspect you probably know the reason (even if you disagree with it) and you're making a polemic point rather than genuinely asking this question.
If I'm mistaken then forgive me. In short - certain sectors have a very skewed gender bias and it's regarded as a good thing to try and correct for that.
The degree of “unfairness” is the same, but the goal isn’t “fairness” as such but rather equality. Whether we personally agree with forced equality or not is really beyond the point in a society that views inclusiveness as good and exclusion as bad.
Dead Comment
First, we need to stem the losses of women in tech that happen due to the traditionally woman-hostile culture that has pervaded the industry for so long, and is only now beginning to recede. Women (and in fact all minority groups) get pushed out of the industry by hostile work environments. A specialized channel like this allows companies to say "We don't tolerate that, so come work for us." It allows them to tap a potentially huge labor force before it shrinks too much.
Second, markets like these offer a less stressful job search for marginalized groups, because they can have greater confidence that they won't get jerked around this time. It means that less women get so fed up that they quit, which means less time and effort is required to reach a critical mass where the momentum of women in tech begets more women in tech on its own.
This isn't about excluding men; it's about providing a more confidence-inducing hiring process for marginalized groups.
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.
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."
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"
A newly-public EEOC ruling resulting from investigative journalism around explicitly discriminatory hiring practices facilitated (and profited from) by one of the more morally-bankrupt technology companies of our time is announced, and your gripe is the journalists aren’t giving Facebook enough credit?
A lot of discrimination happened while Facebook hadn’t fixed the problem. Discrimination which Facebook profited from. Facebook decided to enter the job, credit and real estate ad markets, but didn’t care enough to think through the details.
Recent history has been Facebook et al being brazenly lawless, making money from it, and then getting away with a slap on the wrist. The government starting to show teeth is news, and stating their confirmed finding is a fair headline.
My gripe is that the headline _as it currently is on HN_ is two years out of date, and that the real headline is "Government rules targeting job ads using demographics is illegal".
You can be perfectly willing to hire a 55 year old female construction worker, but you’ll probably save money by only advertising construction jobs to men aged 20-50.
Now I think about it, even in the first case it could make a difference. Rejecting an application from a real individual based on prejudice might be harder to do, due to a stronger feeling of wrongness, than just unchecking a box labelled "female".
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.
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!).
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.
I believe, that yes, for example women of a certain age, have a high statistical chance of getting pregnant soon (or already are pregnant). That is very relevant. As they will suddenly be not avaiable anymore for quite some time. While the employer still hase obligations to them (don't know about US, but definitely in germany).
Now yes, the correct solution can't be to just exclude women of that age or prefer man. But the reality is, that this is happening a lot. And it sucks and is a hard problem for society in general, but I don't believe the mantra helps to exclaim the problem does not exist.
Are you arguing one of those two things or have I misunderstood?
For the higher paying specialized jobs, it’s called a network. But networking is even more biased than formal recruiting approaches.
Hiring managers would then pick a tech stack or set of skills they need, and matches would bubble up based on applicants in the area with the relevant skills.
The "culture fit" question could be another egg to crack. Who knows if interviews are the best way to figure that out...
Also, looking beyond the immediate need, companies would also need to understand that this only applies to very specific positions. You shouldn’t apply this to entry level, nor should you apply this to positions where the employee is expected to adapt quickly to changing tech stacks. What this leaves you with is contracting. You hire experts with a very specific skillset that you need that is verified by an agency. For everything else, there is still not a good generic solution.
You mean like... a university?
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.
Do these cases involve advertising positions that are not listed elsewhere? Because obviously no company can afford to reach everyone who might be interested in a position. I would agree that selective advertising would be much more of a problem if the positions are not listed on employers' websites.
If Facebook also had a jobs board that anyone can search and find ads where employers aren't paying for impressions then I think that would offset a targeted campaign to select groups.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
Sure, it sucks for the interviewees for now, but there's potential to make things better for everyone in the long term.
First two are presumably looking for manual laborers who can lift heavy furniture and install heavy windows.
I previously worked for a moving company and tried to help fill my vacancy when I left the company. We would have been happy to hire a woman who could move sofas and dressers all day in a safe and controlled manner. (The company had previously had one female employee). There just aren't that many of them out there. The resumes I got from women had no indication of manual labor in their work history (they were just shotgunning applications out to every recent job listing). They would have been rejected based on work history (just the same as men) if we weren't desperate. However the company was very short on labor and I called every applicant. None of the female applicants showed up for a working interview
>and Sandhills Publishing Company.
The third is a software company that forces its employees to wear a suit to work. So maybe they're stuck in an antiquated sexist mindset. Maybe they just realized 82% of CS majors are young men.
I do think it's good to remove discriminatory job ad placement, for the sake of that 18% of the population. But don't think for a minute that this will change the gender imbalance in certain industries. It's a pipeline problem.
It's a process, you move goal posts one tiny step at a time and eventually it will become less and less acceptable.
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...
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?
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.
Edited for clarity
> 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/