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Facebook enables gender discrimination in job ads: European human rights body

74 points by Bender

by JuniperMesos

6 subcomments

> The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights said in a February 18 decision that Facebook’s algorithm reinforced gender stereotypes by mainly showing “typically female professions” to female Facebook users in the Netherlands and that Meta (META), the social platform’s owner, should have monitored and adjusted its algorithm to prevent that.
> 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.

by gogasca

1 subcomments

Are those algorithms actually doing the right thing? Most of mechanics are men, same for pre-school teachers are women...these are facts not discrimination or bias.

by MrToadMan

0 subcomment

Worth mentioning the case brought by the DOJ against Meta with regards housing ads discriminating on protected characteristics in 2022.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

by jl6

1 subcomments

Are these ads in the sense of unsolicited adverts, or is this some kind of job search engine where people are actively asking Facebook to find a job for them?

0 subcomment

by amelius

2 subcomments

by skwee357

0 subcomment

But isn’t the point of ads and all these tech companies with billions of data points, is to optimize ads to the people who are most likely to click them?
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.

by msla

1 subcomments

Isn't Europe where headshots are a mandatory part of résumés?
I'm sure that Officially Doesn't contribute to discrimination.