[gascan]

While I see both sides of the argument, as long as the advertiser pays per view, it seems wrong to require the listing to target demographics that are almost certainly uninterested.

Your example of listing a job in Men's Health but not Cosmopolitan seems good. Technically not a perfect analogue as a woman always could buy Men's Health, but in practice very similar.

Spinning off into a different angle, what if an advertiser gets the most qualified female applicants advertising through LinkedIn, and the most qualified male applicants through Facebook? (Again assuming pay per view) Is it wrong for them to target women & men on separate platforms with separate ads? Utterly hypothetical of course.

Or yet a different angle, what if they have ad "A" and ad "B", each subtly designed to excite one of the sexes. Perhaps an ad for the Marines, one emphasizing toughness & grit, the other emphasizing teamwork & "stronger together". Target one at men, one at women. Legal?

To me it seems to come down to the overall behavior of the employer, not Facebook or any one ad.

[detaro]

It seems wrong to allow companies to escape legal rules by choosing to advertise in ways that have badly-fitting payment model.

The multiple ads question is interesting though, and might very well be a valid defense, since they then are advertising to both.

[weberc2]

I’m very skeptical that their motive is hiring discrimination as opposed to cutting costs on ads by targeting the demographic that is most likely to respond to the ad campaign. In other words, if the ad campaign isn’t successful for recruiting women, why would they spend twice as much for no increase in ROI? Maybe they could run a different campaign that targets women, and perhaps they are (if there is something in the article that claimed these employers are only running campaigns that target men, I missed it), or perhaps no one has found a campaign that is comparably cost-effective for hiring women as is the case in STEM fields. I just don’t see what these firms would stand to gain from hiring discrimination and I have a hard time believing they would take a significant financial hit just to be grinches.

[gascan]

Yes, I was thinking about that as I wrote, one imperfect but possible fix would be "no pay per view for job listings". Which, for all I know, could already be the case.

[twblalock]

The ads would still be illegal even if they weren't pay per view.

[gascan]

If they aren't pay per view, there's much less incentive to show them to only certain users, and much less burden on the employer to be inclusive.

[katzgrau]

Fine tuning a message to an audience segment is something every marketer should do. When I first read the headline, this was the use case that seemed obvious.

Different audience segments may want different things from a job. For example, an increasing number of workplaces are offering paid paternity leave. Maybe that's something you want to specifically mention to men.

[f137]

You mean women are different from men? Really?

[psalminen]

https://youtu.be/YLaAgatOVSA?t=1m21s

[user1000]

"While I see both sides of the argument, as long as the advertiser pays per view, it seems wrong to require the listing to target demographics that are almost certainly uninterested."

1) Is making a little economy really more important than giving equal opportunity ? 2) What makes you think you, or the person that designed the ad, knows best what might women (or any other group that might be discriminated against with similar practices) are interested in?

And that, especially when advertising for a job! Women may not be particularly "excited" by the message that conveys the ad, but they might be looking for a job all the same.

All your points sound the same to me, it comes down to : "women like cooking, teamwork and are not interested in being trucker, policemen or technologists, and men like sports and being stong and don't want to be a hairdresser or a nurse" now let's apply these hard facts to cut the costs when advertising for jobs. That way we make sure our stereotypes stay true, and it doesn't matter if it's unfair, it's just how are things. And I don't think I can change your strongly stereotypical view of gender in this comment alone, but I'm telling you : that can change, and women want that to change, because they want equal pay, and equal pay also means equal opportunity to high paying jobs.

Employment opportunity is not the ideal topic to split hair, let's just not target ads at one gender.

[eezurr]

If every person was the same on the average, then we would not have targeted advertising. Google/Facebook et al would not have invested millions (or billions?) of dollars in building a targeted ad network. The evidence is against you in terms of where people (both the seller and buyer) place their money.

Knowing what a type of person wants on the average is not discrimination.

[village-idiot]

The problem is that you have to determine the employer’s intent, which is hard.

[gascan]

Intent is nine tenths of the law.