[gascan]

I honestly don't even understand the purpose of advertising anything to only men or only women.

If you pay per view, it's entirely rational to target towards the demographic that produces the most spend for your ad budget.

Why would you waste money advertising, e.g., mascara or sanitary pads to men? Sure, there's probably some infinitesimal fraction of men who would be interested, but targeting them profitably is not a trivial exercise.

[jamescostian]

Why would you waste money advertising to women who don't want mascara or don't need pads? I would think you'd be better of targetting people who bought some sort of eye makeup if you wanted to sell mascara, and target people who bought pads or tampons if you were selling pads.

[gascan]

I'm not an ad man, but you have imperfect data about your customers, and I gather it's all about trying to predict what they might buy based on very imperfect/incomplete information about them. Plus, your ability to apply more advanced heuristics is constrained by your ability to develop them, both from a technical & marketing standpoint.

"User is a woman" would, in this hypothetical example, be one factor in your larger weighting algorithm. A weighting factor that is, might I add, quite easy to implement compared to detecting male performing arts majors with a specialty in costume design.

[IanCal]

> Why would you waste money advertising to women who don't want mascara or don't need pads?

Because you don't know in advance. It's entirely why advertisers offer so many different bits of information on you, to optimise this.

> I would think you'd be better of targetting people who bought some sort of eye makeup if you wanted to sell mascara, and target people who bought pads or tampons if you were selling pads.

And people do this, if they have this information. Of course, there's also the side that you don't want to advertise to someone you strongly expect to buy, because it's the conversions from no-sale to sale you care about.

[meowface]

In classic rubber duck-debugging style, I ended up realizing that as soon as I pressed submit.

In that case I suppose it's not very ethically questionable for things that are very clearly 100% (within a minuscule margin of error) men's only (prostate health, etc.) or women's only (sanitary pads).

I guess the real quandary is for stuff that's male-dominated like hard, dangerous physical labor (coal mining etc.), but not 100% men. If a recruiter can statistically prove that the most efficient use of their advertising dollars to hire for a coal mining job is by targeting only men, 1) is it sexist and/or unethical, and 2) should it be legal?

[mcny]

> a recruiter can statistically prove that the most efficient use of their advertising dollars to hire for a coal mining job is by targeting only men, 1) is it sexist and/or unethical, and 2) should it be legal?

I put this at the same level as only hiring women to teach elementary school. Yes, it is sexist and uneducated. No, it shouldn't be legal.

[meowface]

I think there's a difference between "hiring only men/women" and "advertising to only men/women". A company could launch a recruitment campaign which is only visible to one gender, but still not discriminate against applicants from the opposite gender. Presumably they have many more ways to list job openings than targeted Facebook ads, so they're not specifically excluding one gender from that job; just from the ad.

[WillPostForFood]

What if you spend the same amount of money but create separate ads targeted at men and women?

What if you are trying to get more female engineers at your company, and want to target women?

[briandear]

Isn’t it discriminatory to have an intent to discriminate based on gender? “We want more <gender> at our company.” Unless gender is a bonafide qualification, that should be illegal just as “we want to hire more white people.”

[WillPostForFood]

Right, but let's go with the premise that you have an imbalance, and are trying to bring into balance. Then a gender or race targeted ad seems like a reasonable approach.

I guess my point is an targeted ad isn't evidence of intent to discriminate, and in fact can be a key component of pro-diversity actions.

[drewmol]

If it's sexist(Wikipedia definition, yeah... I looked it up) then it's unethical, and if it's unethical I'd assume that's because of the sexism. Is it unethical and sexist? If it is, being overtly sexist/racist/classist and supporting it with data seems worse to me that just the former. Even it it is, it should surely not be outlawed.

[pbhjpbhj]

Sexism isn't automatically unethical. There's also more than one ethical framework.

For example, buying different scented shower gel based on the sex of the recipient.

[drewmol]

I tried to avoid confusion by referring to the Wikipedia definition, which by my ethical framework pretty much always unethical, but should very rarely be outlawed. It would be a nightmare to validate.