Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads
Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but:<p>If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I&#x27;d get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they&#x27;re much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we&#x27;re talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. Not because they&#x27;re less capable, but because there&#x27;s less of them as a percentage of the population. I shouldn&#x27;t have the government mandating that I can&#x27;t tune my advertising campaign for ROI, which is basically the only point of running one if the first place.<p>However, on the other side of the coin that&#x27;s pretty unfair because clearly there are good software engineers in those demographics and I&#x27;d be excluding them to save money.<p>I think both alternatives suck in different ways, but as a business I&#x27;d probably choose ROI over fair. It&#x27;s all pretty hypothetical though, because Facebook ads are probably one of the worst ways I can think of to find candidates.