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'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. Not because they're less capable, but because there's less of them as a percentage of the population. I shouldn't have the government mandating that I can'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's pretty unfair because clearly there are good software engineers in those demographics and I'd be excluding them to save money.<p>I think both alternatives suck in different ways, but as a business I'd probably choose ROI over fair. It's all pretty hypothetical though, because Facebook ads are probably one of the worst ways I can think of to find candidates.