Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers From Seeing Job Ads. The Federal Government Thinks That’s Illegal

TL:DR: All aspects of recruitment, assessment, promotion, firing are subject to federal laws/EEOC. FB has been violating these laws by allowing organizations to microtarget just younger people with job recruitment ads. The EEOC ruled that such practices are illegal. This whole issue came to light because or ProPublica's reporting and research, and that research used data collection. 


In the original piece by ProPublica, Angwin and Larson reported on large firms using targeted Facebook ads to recruit potential employees. That is legal. However, the firms asked Facebook to limit who saw the ads, and to not show the ads to anyone who was too old. That has been declared illegal by the EEOC.

A basic explanation of what this entails:

They use their I/O words to explain precisely what law was broken:

Later in the article: 

They explain microtargeting, or how ads can be aimed at specific groups at the exclusion of others:

And microtargeting isn't illegal. That's good business, right? It allows organizations to target the most likely customers. In fact, some of the companies argued that targeting likely hires is just like targeting people most likely to use a given service:

I think this would be a great discussion prompt for students. How is advertising for a job different than advertising for a service or product? What laws protect one but not the other?

As a stats instructor, I also think it is interesting that ProPublica stumbled upon this issue while collecting data on Facebook ad placement and politics. And that was a big, communal data collection conducted with the help of ProPublica readers. Because anyone can be a scientist and help with science, my friends.

More on that political placement study here: https://www.propublica.org/article/help-us-monitor-political-ads-online

The follow-up piece has a lot less information about the targeted ads BUT does cite the EEOC and their ruling on the topic. This is helpful when teaching I/O because it shows the ongoing relevance of the EEOC and their role in making legal decisions about new hiring issues.


PS: If you can, support ProPublica. Their investigative reporting is top-notch, in-depth, and considers many different angles. This is not the click-bait reporting we've grown accustomed to. The story I linked above is one of several stories that Propulica has published about this issue.

Crash Course videos for I/O

The Crash Course YouTube channel contains a series of well-edited, well-researched, close-captioned, engaging educational videoes. Like, there are so many terrible-but-well-intended educational videos out there. And there is so much terrible content on the Internet. But Crash Course is the real deal. I use their videos extensively in my Stats class and their Psychology content is also good.

They don't have an I/O psychology series, but they do have a Government and Politics series. This series covers a lot of I/O ground in terms of employment laws and discrimination. So, the content isn't being explained through the lens of I/O psychology, but I think it may stick with your students better to have it emphasized that the ways we try to promote workplace fairness aren't just nice or right, they are the law. Here are three great videos that you could use in I/O:

Sexual Harassment

Affirmative Action

Discrimination

Terrible job interview questions

Apropos of nothing, what's the worst question you've been asked in a job interview and how did you answer it/how do you wish you'd answered it?

— Erin Bartram (@erin_bartram) April 3, 2019

So, this thread brings the cringe. Go see the dumpster fire for yourself, but I'll include a few of the response here:

But it is ALSO a really good way to illustrate two things in I/O:

1) Why structured interviews are better than unstructured interviews. Sure, we have the data to back up this claim but these tweets demonstrate just how terrible interviewers can be.

2) This serves as a great way to review protected classes in the U.S. You could ask your students to match every tweet to the specific protected group this potentially harmed.

Performance appraisal for super heroes

Most Intro to I/O classes cover performance appraisal, which includes employee comparison procedures, like rank-ordering employees for specific purposes, like selecting a new manager.

One engaging, interactive example is to ask your students to create their own tier system for Marvel Comic Univers characters. https://tiermaker.com/create/85mcucharacters-29248 allows you to do just this. Note: They list 115 different characters (!) which is probably overwhelming for students but maybe they could just create a rank order for leadership skills, the capacity to work on a team, ability to persevere in difficult situations, etc.

Note: This example doesn't reflect on my feelings about the characters, I was just playing around with the template to create an example for the blog.

ANOTHER way to discuss rank ordering is by using the COUNTLESS lists of MCU character rankings that already exist.

My favorite example of this are efforts to rank order all of the MCU superheroes. It is an accessible example for our students, better then a dry example from a textbook, AND you can demonstrate how there are all sorts of different criteria one can use for rank ordering since there are some many different lists of MCU heroes based on various characteristics:

Brute Strength:

https://www.thegamer.com/mcu-main-characters-marvel-weakest-strongest-ranked/

Ranked from least to most funny:
https://www.looper.com/151456/the-funniest-mcu-characters-ranked/

Ranked from "Not worth saving" to "If they die, I die"

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ehisosifo1/ranking-marvel-cinematic-universe-characters