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Many Job Ads on Facebook Illegally Exclude Women, ACLU Says (nbcnews.com)

Facebook's advertising platform is being used by prospective employers to discriminate against women, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday. From a report: The American Civil Liberties Union, joined by a labor union and a law firm that specializes in representing employees, has filed a written charge against Facebook with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces anti-discrimination laws in the workplace. The charge asks for an investigation of the social media company and an injunction against what it calls discriminatory practices at a company with a sizable influence over the U.S. labor market. It also claims Facebook's system violates anti-discrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The social network has faced sustained criticism for years that it fails to stop discriminatory ads of various kinds, from housing ads that exclude certain races to job ads targeted only at younger workers. In August, Facebook said it would remove 5,000 targeted advertising options from its platform in an effort to prevent discrimination.

3 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Definitely Wrong by Luckyo · · Score: 1, Troll

    In current climate, not hiring women in male dominated environment is not just right. It's mandatory. By hiring women, you open yourself to massive liability from potential "she had a meeting with a colleague with doors closed = #metoo" which can end a company's reputation, and with it, the company itself.

    Unfortunate, but that's just the way it is today. Much of progress that was made in workplace gender equality was all but wiped out in last couple of years. We're back in the 90s or so.

  2. Re:Everything is "discriminatory" by American+AC+in+Paris · · Score: 0, Troll

    The entire point of advertising is to reach those groups most likely to respond to your product.

    There was a time in living memory where this argument would have applied perfectly to job postings for doctors, lawyers, accountants, and scientists. Advertising has long been used to define and amplify what you should be doing with your life based on your demographic peculiarities–regardless of what you actually want to do or are capable of doing.

    you can't even acknowledge a difference between right and wrong, good or evil.

    Let me try: it is fundamentally wrong that the number of women in computing has plummeted even as the number of women in other major technical professions–including law, accounting, medicine, and scientific research–has approached parity. Women are excluded from programming not because they can't do the job–they're excluded because the community is comfortable prioritizing our abusive, "brutally honest" Mamet-esque dick-swinging over professionalism. That's evil.

    It's like we're trying to unmake ourselves.

    You're exactly right! We are trying to unmake ourselves, if by "ourselves" you mean "society's long-standing tradition of blithely excluding entire swaths of people from consideration for professional roles based on wholly unrelated things like gender, race, or sexual orientation."

    That is a good thing that society should do. We should want to fix this, not wallow in it.

    --

    Obliteracy: Words with explosions

  3. Re:Strawman by William+Baric · · Score: 0, Troll

    Feminists like you forget too easily that men also didn't have a right to vote. For example, in the UK, the universal right to vote for men was given at the exact same time as the universal right to vote for women. Feminists like you forget that men were sent to die on battlefields and they were the ones doing all dangerous work. The reality is feminists like you forget women were always protected and privileged. Men were always considered as having less value than women.

    In today's society, the difference of perceived value is still everywhere. Let me take a very mundane example. Where I live (Montreal), a woman can ask a bus driver to drop her between two bus stops, in order to reduce the risk of her being assaulted. A man can't ask for this privilege, even though in Canada men are three times more likely to be the victim of a level 2 assault (with physical violence or the use of a weapon), and four times more likely to be the victim of a level 3 assault (resulting in injuries).

    We are now to a point where white men are discriminated against openly, and everyone find this acceptable. We are now to a point where white men are nothing but second-class citizen by society. What is crazy is that you find this blatant discrimination against white men to be morally a good thing.