[ausbah]

"consequence of the real world" feels like a cop out answer to the question. that very well may be part of if not the whole reason (I'm not a labor economists or the sort so I'm not going to speculate), but I would rather see if there aren't other systemic reasons for the biases - ie reinforcing gender with different jobs in media consumption, the domination of one gender in a type of job creating an environment that turns aways members of the other gender intentionally or unintentionally

and even of "that's just the way things are", I don't see any good reason why the advertising needs to remain so targeted on the lines of gender. job recruitment should be as free of biases as possible

[sokoloff]

In the car repair job example, it’s not clear to me that the ad is being targeted on gender; in fact, it’s pretty clear to me that it’s being targeted based on revealed interest in cars. That the latter has a correlation with gender is true but not especially concerning to me.

[thitcanh]

I don’t disagree with you, but that will make advertising less effective. A nursing job shown to me and a programming job shown to my sister will both be ignored and wasted. The opposite wouldn’t be true.

Likewise showing me a car shop job would also be wasted, not because of my gender, but because I have no interest in cars, as my Facebook profile clearly shows.