Research Says Facebook's Ad Algorithm Perpetuates Gender Bias 105
New research from a team at the University of Southern California provides further evidence that Facebook's advertising system is discriminatory, showing that the algorithm used to target ads reproduced real-world gender disparities when showing job listings, even among equally qualified candidates. The Intercept reports: In fields from software engineering to sales to food delivery, the team ran sets of ads promoting real job openings at roughly equivalent companies requiring roughly the same skills, one for a company whose existing workforce was disproportionately male and one that was disproportionately female. Facebook showed more men the ads for the disproportionately male companies and more women the ads for the disproportionately female companies, even though the job qualifications were the same. The paper concludes that Facebook could very well be violating federal anti-discrimination laws. "We confirm that Facebook's ad delivery can result in skew of job ad delivery by gender beyond what can be legally justified by possible differences in qualifications," the team wrote.
The paper can be found here.
The paper can be found here.
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When will people outright reject this woke bullshit?
When it's no longer needed.
The pendulum will swing - and swing hard.
That's actually how we got here. That pendulum didn't start swinging at 'woke'.
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I live iin a major 'liberal' city and i work in a major 'liberal' industry. From the descriptions I've heard from some opinionated people from the right I should be biting my nails at work every day worried that the least lil slip-up will get me 'canceled'. It's the opposite, actually. People treat me well and I show them the same courtesy. Frankly, I have a lot of good times with my coworkers. That stuff that Google's going through with Damore... that feels like a million miles away from where I work.
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I've been on the other side of this.
I also live in a "liberal" city and work in a major "liberal industry".
A girl at work was flirting with me for *A YEAR AND A HALF* and I never treated her as _anything_ but a friend. A member of the group. (Others in the group would *constantly* heckler her and tease her -- everything from her clothes, phone, to her national origin or public transit. Probably: "Omg, I saw you hug him!! He's your new boyfriend?!?)
For a year and a half, I did *Nothing* with her. She invited
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Why exactly was this downvoted? Too much truth?
Re: * Eyeroll * (Score:2)
I think you just don't know how to deal with young entitled women.
Didn't get that bit about the beard.
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No, it would not mean any of those things. Wokeness, in its current form, does not want people treated identically in identical circumstances. Rather, action X should receive consequence Y for all members of group A and consequence Z for all those in B.
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Men and women are still different (Score:2)
Well, it's not all "woke bullshit", but yes, there is some truth to what you say.
It's truly unfortunate that in the effort of proving that men and women are equal there are too many who push that to mean that men and women are the same. Gender differentiation does not mean gender bias. Bias is when you are fitting someone into a role or framework against their choice. Gender differentiation is where someone's own choices and preference express differences that are along gender lines. You can reject enfo
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> Facebook's algorithm isn't perpetuating gender bias. The real world data it is based on is expressing the inherent gender differentiation
I leave this excellent video analysis of the possible sources of bias (TL;DW reality, data collection, model, deployment)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Facebook's algorithm isn't perpetuating gender bias. The real-world data it is based on is expressing the inherent gender differentiation that any large sampling of men and women will show.
If it leads to women not seeing a job opportunity, that's perpetuating bias (and currently illegal). You can't just blindly follow an algorithm if it's a highly regulated thing. You have to actually analyze what results the algorithm produces.
Re: Men and women are still different (Score:2)
The algorithm isn't where the so called bias is. The algorithm is neutral. It's the data that's feeding the algorithm. That data is the person's own browsing habits. It's not the algorithms responsibility to apply a reverse bias to a person's own browsing habits. If I don't click on computer programming articles, if I have a degree in the Arts and the algorithm knows it, if I show no interest in computer ads, then I am training the algorithm not to show me a computer science job posting ad.
And you are
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The algorithm is neutral. It's the data that's feeding the algorithm
Not really the point. If you're using data like this to feed something that legally cannot be biased in this way, then you can't use the algorithm for this purpose.
The data can become biased based on who already has a job in the field because it influences their Facebook activity, which carries existing bias into the recruitment advertisement process.
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Nice and convoluted. And nothing more than a supposition.
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If that sounds so complicated to you, maybe you should sit this one out. On my part, it's a supposition. Facebook actually has the data.
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First let's get something straight. You are using words like "legally" and I don't think you really understand what's happening here. Facebook is not a government department. They are not your friend. They are not your employee. They exist for one reason and for one reason only, and that is to make money for their shareholders. When you are on their site you are in their house. They make money off of ad clicks. They don't make money from showing you things. They make money when you click on them. S
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Since you seem completely ignorant of the legal basis, I'll leave you with only a link to educate yourself and not a thought out reply.
https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/... [eeoc.gov]
Facebook acts as an advertising platform for recruitment and they have to follow these rules.
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When will people outright reject this anti-woke bullshit?
Here is a carefully researched paper that shows very strong evidence of systemic bias in the Facebook system. It's clearly illegal, even by the fairly weak standards of the laws that are in place.
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Why is it illegal to show women ads that they are more likely to be interested in?
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When will people outright reject this woke bullshit?
Where did these people touch you to make you so afraid of them? Is reducing bias such a threat to your white manliness that you feel the need to go on the offence at every opportunity?
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Haha, you are such an optimist. I rather see a society where rational thought is suppressed, and the great bulk of the population lives under extreme delusional thought. Basically, an authoritarian theocracy. As the society's technology then crumbles because delusion doesn't get things fixed, it will be taken over by China, another autocracy, but not crippled by delusional thought.
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When will people outright reject this woke bullshit?
Not being from the USA, any sort of conservative or having an IQ under 80, I have missed all the opportunities to use that word. As I seem to understand it, it seems to mean showing a willingness to treat other human beings with the same possibility of respect I may treat other people in my groups.
The pendulum will swing - and swing hard.
IYour analogy does not work as the pendulum is still well on the disrespect side and has only just begun to fall towards the middle. Certainly, it may have started moving a bit sooner outside your country and we
FB Ads are based on your activity (Score:1, Insightful)
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Otherwise my friend Leslie wouldn't get one damn listing for construction work.
It's 2021 and people still don't understand.. (Score:5, Insightful)
How absolutely disingenuous (to be kind, the alternative is stupid) do you have to be to not understand that if men tend to click and show interest in certain types of companies/products and women tend to click and show interest in certain types of companies/products, or they tend to be friends with people with similar interests that they will tend to be shown those things preferentially.
What next, a breathless fucking article about how in a sample of 100 random men and women the men tended to be shown ads for Arduino and Bitcoin wallets more often than women, who were preferentially shown ads for jewel matching games and MLM marketing? Jesus Christ, get a fucking grip. I promise you there's no "If (IsWoman()) { ShowAvonJobListings() }" type code in Facebook's algortithms.
Also, I hate to break it to these "researchers" but associating existing demographics of the employee base with "proof" of discrimination is also nonsense. Why not go predominant customer base? Or first letter of last name of existing employees? Or.. any other arbitrary measurement.
I 100% guarantee you by these metrics most online Facebook or LinkedIn ads will tend to "discriminate" against black people similarly. You can really get the 'scrimination double play!
Re:It's 2021 and people still don't understand.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Very disingenuous, but it doesn't stop hordes of people from perpetuating falsehoods to make things look worse than they are.
Feminists are literally using falsehood to prop up and encourage abusive patriarchal practices by corporations. Equality for women isn't even on the map anymore, much less equality for everyone. Just look at what happened to James Damore when he said "Make working at a tech company interesting, or even tolerable, to women and people who have choices, and they may decide to work there in larger numbers than they already do."
Unfortunately for all of us, his ideas pitted corporate America against feminist ideas of equality and freedom. Allowing a salaried employee to have any quality of life would destroy the bottom line. Their profits are not only the result of generationally transmitted toxic attitudes to employee health and well being, those practices are a requirement for their whole company to operate.
And somehow, everything turned out to be a big gain for the tech companies. Their treatment of their employees was defended by feminists everywhere. Feminists came out of the woodwork to defend the patriarchy! Hilarious, and tragic, but par for the course. Damore was fired, castigated, and the subject of revising toxic patriarchal structures became verboten to discuss in corporate America, without corporate approval of the subject matter. No one will defend you if you do and the people who should help are no longer manning their posts. They have abandoned the ideas of equality in favor of corporate power. Go figure.
Fucking crazy, if you ask me, but what do I know. That said, I will not be surprised if we have "diversity contracts" between the state and corporations soon. Schools will be required to provide X amount of female, POC, and LGBTQ students who are required to work in STEM fields for their lifetime. If follows the totalitarian corporatist agenda of today's feminists to the letter.
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Don't call those bastards "feminist". Feminism was/is a noble idea that somehow a woman is human and deserves equal rights. It has nothing to do with the cult of 53 genders, racial quotas, "microagressions", banning and firing all unbelievers (or worse, heretics!).
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Feminists most certainly engaged in all those activities.
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Notice where I said "...pitted corporate America against feminist ideas of equality and freedom." I do recognize to what you are referring. It is the kind of humanism we used to call feminism and its beautiful to those of us who aren't consumed with the love of money.
That said, they self identify as feminists. There is no way you will get me to deny them their claim to identify how they want to. I'm not some cultural Martin Luther. I'd rather keep my life just like it is.
The relationship between the two
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Very disingenuous, but it doesn't stop hordes of people from perpetuating falsehoods to make things look worse than they are. [...] Just look at what happened to James Damore when he said
...a lot more shit than you think he said. He wasn't let go for the part you're talking about. Talk about disingenuous.
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I read everything he wrote in the memo. It is there for anyone to read.
There was just one reason he was let go. The fictional rationalizations provided were numerous and ultimately irrelevant.
The result is all that matters, and that result is self evident. Anyone who has ideas that could help the workers of the world better not speak up, no matter how noble their intentions, unless they have been told what to say by a powerful group of people who will defend them.
Re:It's 2021 and people still don't understand.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Great Rant. Too bad it is ENTIRELY WRONG. If you had RTFA, you would realize you have no idea what you are talking about.
Specifically the study asked Facebook to show their employment offer to everybody. They did not use any target audience. No "Jewel players", no "Arduino" NOTHING.
It was entirely "Show this ad for delivery drivers to everyone. And also show this Instagram driver ad to everyone."
But some how the Instagram driver ad was shown to mostly women while the "delivery driver' ad was shown to mostly men.
You are wrong, this is real sexism, not a fake liberal complaint. Mainly because the liberals were smarter than you and made sure to check for the simple and obvious issue you falsely thought was the problem.
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Ads with stereotypical macho images were shown mostly to men, even though the men had no idea what they were looking at. The study concluded that “Facebook has an automated image classification mechanism in place that is used to steer different ads towards different subsets of the user population.” In other words, the bias was on Facebook’s end, not in the eye of the beholder.
They achieved this by using invisible to the naked eye p
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But it's still illegal when applied to housing or employment ads, and all Facebook has to do is turn off this kind of classification, but they aren't doing that. In the past Facebook used to deliver obviously outright illegal filters to people placing these ads, which should have made them an accessory.
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Let's say you have Bob and Alice. Facebook serves ads not on the basis of gender specifically, but on the basis of Bob liking Football, or Alice liking diamond rings. You would still see a gender bias in ads served, simply becaus
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I'm not sure how hard this is to understand. First, Facebook doesn't show anything to "everybody". Everything is targeted.
Second, if mostly men tend to click on one sort of thing or things, then Facebook will tend to show them similar things. This isn't sexism. The "research" also assumes one side is better than the other. Is working for DoorDash "worse" than working for Dominoes because they employ more women? Seems like a sexist assumption.
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How absolutely disingenuous (to be kind, the alternative is stupid) do you have to be to not even read the summary where it clearly states that it was nothing to do with clicks and everything to do with who the ads were shown to?
The law says you show these ads to everyone regardless of gender. Facebook didn't, which is illegal. It's not hard to comprehend.
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Sigh. The ads are shown based on clicks. What kind of moron would pay Facebook to randomly show ads? I'm going to advertise my job to 80 year old retired grandpas and people who already have jobs making $400k/year? Right, makes sense lol. Sure, Facebook, charge me for those ad views.
Facebook builds up a model of its users. Based on this model they try to target things to be at least very slightly more likely to appeal to that person. This includes job ads. If you have a group of people who click on NVidia G
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How absolutely disingenuous (to be kind, the alternative is stupid) do you have to be to not understand that if men tend to click and show interest in certain types of companies/products and women tend to click and show interest in certain types of companies/products, or they tend to be friends with people with similar interests that they will tend to be shown those things preferentially.
Laws regarding job advertisement require you to ignore these differences. Facebook does not get an exception for blindly deploying an algorithm. Not searching for or clicking specific things on Facebook should not exclude you from a job opportunity, especially if that's down to gender differences. Being less likely to be involved with a thing on Facebook does not make you less qualified on its own.
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Bullshit. Facebook could eliminate gender entirely from any algorithms they have and the outcome would be the same, and nobody wants to pay Facebook to randomly show ads. You have to go to second order effects to "prove" discrimination here. First, they're assuming that somehow showing ads from companies predominately male is somehow "better"? Second, is the assumption that every ad must explicitly be shown to 50.1% female and 49.9% males? Seems kind of silly since Facebook's own user demographics don't eve
Not even a peer reviewed journal (Score:1)
Just another manuscript with questionable motives and without any independent checks nor reviews.
It is easy for anyone to "publish' like this.
Or... (Score:1)
It succeeds in squeezing clicks and/or money out of its target market. But hey, a rock could be declared sexist etc today and people would nod their heads and agree.
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Yeah, buildings are structural hierarchies, where the foundation is beneath the floors and walls, and such oppression is unacceptable.
Alternative explanation (Score:4, Insightful)
One other possibility would be that Facebook uses interest-based targeting.
If men tend to mention or like Dominos, and women tend to mention or like Instacart, then Facebook will tend to target accordingly. That's not bias, that's knowing their market.
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It's illegal. The law says that such ads must be shown to everyone equally, regardless of gender, skin tone etc. Otherwise it's self-perpetuating - of course you are going to get more clicks from men if 90% of the people you show the ad to are men.
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The advertising can't state a discriminatory preference, or be shown in such a way as to achieve such a discriminatory preference. It would be illegal, for example, for me to advertise and tell a company "don't show me to black potential tenants".
OTOH, I've advertised jobs for developers on places like Stack Overflow, because that is where developers tend to be reachable. Unsurprisingly, Stack Overflow is around 93% male, with male developers being even higher than that, and extremely experienced develope
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Let me see if I've got this right:
You think that Facebook employs a person whose job it is to figure out the gender ratios of corporations who might buy employment advertising so that Facebook can steer those ads to the appropriate demographic?
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No, that's your stupidity.
I do believe that much of what Facebook claims is done by algorithm is actually done by people. It's called a 'mechanical turk' and most AI companies use them.
But I never said that. I simply stated that the study claimed Facebook is engaged in discriminatory behavior. Stop trying to 'expand' what people say to the point it sounds absurd and stick to what they actually say. I also claimed the far right based "explanations" that focused on natural human behavior is clearly mist
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Huh? You..don't know how Facebook works by now? If you post a job ad for a C# developer, you don't want to pay for people who have shown 0 interest or history in development. Instead, you expect Facebook to, _regardless of gender/race/etc..._, show the ad to anyone who has shown some sort of interest/past with at least some sort of software development.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to take the logical step here. Fact: More men tend to be interested in such things. You're blaming Facebook for s
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You continue to totally misunderstand what the study said and what I said.
Let me be clear.
1) The exact same instructions were given to Facebook for two different jobs. It was told to show it to everybody.
2) Facebook then IGNORED THE INSTRUCTIONS and instead showed the ad for Instagram deliveries to mostly women and the other to mostly women.
Advertisers have the right to have their ads shown to the people they ask it for. Facebook does NOT have the right to ignore their instructions and decide who gets the
Not just Facebook... (Score:1)
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Re: Not just Facebook... (Score:1)
Yanno what (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't care.
Why ?
Because everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is either biased or racist depending on whom is asked and what agenda they're trying to push.
Algorithms, single family homes, standardized testing, college entrance requirements, hell even MATH is racist apparently.
It's to the point of lunacy.
So, yet another cry of " racism " or " bias " is just one more brick in the wall.
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I don't care. Why? Because everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is either biased or racist depending on whom is asked and what agenda they're trying to push.
It isn't, but you obviously want it to be that way.
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Apparently you missed that text in your own blockquote. Not his view, he's talking about what he sees others doing. Nice personal attack, however.
Bias as a symptom? (Score:2)
This might be a bit of a hot take, but maybe instead of going after the bias itself, it would be better to attack the root cause and prevent companies from using any personalized information at all in deciding which ads to show. After all, if you show a
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No Worse and Likely Better Than Std Advertising (Score:3)
The only real difference between facebook's ads and normal television or print ads is that the ads are served at a much more granular level.
I mean do you think that an advertisement that runs on battlebots, a hunting magazine or the like is seen by the same fraction of men and women? Of course not! Do the people placing the ad take into account who is most likely to respond to an ad when they place it? Of course they do, it's just they have to iterate using their brains and past results not granular click level data.
In fact, I think the targeted ads are almost certainly a boon not a harm to women and minorities in those fields. If I'm a woman interested in a job in a traditionally male field I don't care how many women who *aren't* in the field don't see the ad. I care that I see it and, if I have the (unfortunately less common) history and various other correlates of say being into coding or flying bush planes or whatever I'll likely get to see those ads and since women are often less connected to informal networks in male heavy industries that let people know about openings this seems like a win for diversity not some discrimination against women.
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To be clear that's not to say that it might not be better if facebook's algorithm was slightly different in this regard. But it's also worth remembering that there are fairness impossibility results which say you can't hope to make both the type 1 and type 2 errors equal amount two groups with differing base rates.
In other words, if facebook's algorithms didn't do this they could also be accused of bias as, say in female leaning occupation, they would then be serving men ads at a lower expected click/posit
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The only real difference between facebook's ads and normal television or print ads is that the ads are served at a much more granular level.
Yes, and that obviously makes them fundamentally different.
do you think that an advertisement that runs on battlebots, a hunting magazine or the like is seen by the same fraction of men and women?
No, but that's still fundamentally different from a website about battlebots deliberately showing different ads to men and women when it's explicitly illegal to do that.
Technology changes situations, you can't simply use the rules of the past for every new situation. Lack of imagination like that is how we get stupid laws that don't adequately address modern situations.
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It's not explicitly illegal, that's your error. You're blaming the second order effect (ads shown to people will be based on their click/search/browsing history and network of relationships) with the first (men and women and people of different races tend to browse/click/search differently and have different social network relationships, and also job histories). If you want to find the "sexism" find out why men and women are different. Good luck with that.
It's a common error, so don't feel bad half the peop
Unfair To Do Otherwise. (Score:3)
Seems to me the goal isn't to tell people what careers/jobs they should want to take but rather to ensure that gender isn't a reason that one gender gets less of a shot at the jobs they want. Seems to me that means if facebook chooses to serve job ads to women that they are less likely to be interested in than the job ads they show to men *that* would be unfair and discriminatory.
But the very reason that facebook's algorithm behaves this way is that men and women do (for whatever reason) have different preferences in what jobs they want to have and finding out that a company is largely male (female) is evidence that other men (women) would be more interested in that job. Given that the base rates will never be equal (e.g. facebook isn't going to get exactly the same number of job ads of all kinds nor do men and women use or click ads at exactly the same rate) it follows that if facebook *doesn't* consider this kind of information they will be treating one gender worse than the other (showing them ads they know are less likely to be for jobs they want).
Look you might disagree with this analysis and maybe it's wrong but it's not a crazy one and until the legislature is willing to bite the bullet and clarify which notion of fairness is legally required it seems unfair to hold facebook liable when an equally strong argument could have been made they were discriminating if they didn't take such information into account.
(This is what I was trying to say but failing the first time).
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Look you might disagree with this analysis and maybe it's wrong but it's not a crazy one
It's not a crazy idea, it's a stupid idea.
The point of these laws that Facebook is willfully violating is to ensure equality of access, not outcome.
Your views on preferences by gender are shaped by practices such as these, which are self-reinforcing. That's why they've been made illegal — because who sees what matters a whole lot. We are visual creatures, we have more of our brain oriented towards visual processing than we do towards any other sense.
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men and women do (for whatever reason) have different preferences in what jobs they want to have
While that's true, it's not the only factor. It could be that you're already employed in that field. If you're not, you may not be involved with those circles on Facebook. If the real world has a gender bias on a field, you could be perpetuating the bias by basing job recommendations on the interactions that result.
Regardless, the law says you can't base ad targeting for employment on genetically-predicted interest (at least by specific classes of genes like those that define race or sex).
I don't know about their findings (Score:2)
I've advertised for my book on FB. During the process of advertising, I told it to narrow the selection to U.S. women between ages of 40-65, because I thought that may be the demographics my book may appeal to. So, I can totally see the companies that were predominantly male may have skewed their ads to male users vs. those from female-dominated companies. So, it may not be FB, but the people paying for the advertisements.
Now, even if the companies did that, I don't see how one could deduce that the prac
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even if the companies did that, I don't see how one could deduce that the practice is illegal. Things get advertised all the time
The practice is specifically illegal when used with job or housing advertisements, and when the criteria involve protected classes. You can't advertise those things to specific sexes, ages, races, or religions, and deliberate attempts to do those things by selecting secondary criteria likely to deliver the desired result are also illegal.
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People perpetuate Gender Bias (Score:1)
Because men and women are different. They are good at different things and like enjoy different things.
The feminaz1s have to accept that fact, and stop discrimination.
No more tokens, whether STEM jobs, astronauts or the VPOTUS.
https://www.pnas.org/content/1... [pnas.org]
The only reason to do a hiring FB ad (Score:1)
Targetted advertising == bias (Score:2)
What do you expect? That's the whole point. If you want real equality, disable targeted advertising. Good for everybody, except sleazy advertisers and recipients of ad money.
On a similar topic, if we really want to break the social parts of gender bias, perpetuated from an early age (go to a toy store and marvel at 3-year old toys), we need to look at everything kids are exposed to, since their birth. Jobs ads are way, way, way, way too late in the game.
What's wrong with bias? (Score:2)
I may be missing the point, but can someone please explain to me how and why it's always bad to have a 50/50 balance between genders in all matters, or that any imbalance against women automatically means discrimination, though any imbalance favouring women is no big deal? Equality of opportunity is fine, but many disparities are simply a result of personal choice. How can we ever have 50/50 equality unless we start forcing very large parts of the population to do things they don't want to do? I can't se
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Hear, bloody hear.
This is the voice of moderate, decent reason.
But the feminaz1s control education, the media and the Democratic Party, which means they can force their discrimination on us and this voice will very rarely be heard.
Anti-Discimination Laws? (Score:2)
Since when did targeted advertisement have to target in a non-discriminatory way? I imagine the algorithm concludes that women would want to see ads for mostly-female companies, not that women shouldn't work for mostly-male companies.
Man makes so-called 'AI' in their own image (Score:2)
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