> “It’s not cost efficient” isn’t a valid reason to discriminate against people, if you ask me.
Moreover, it's not, in general, a legal reason in the US to discriminate where a protected class is involved, including, in employment, age over 40 or gender.
Well, I mean, if you'd rather a political than a mechanics-of-law explanation as to why the law treats two situations differently mo, it's legal because heterosexual couples plus women outside of such couples combine to form a powerful voting bloc, and gender rating, compared to it's absence with no other change in practice, is a benefit to that group.
Specifically, compared to perfect allocation of costs, it's a small subsidy from people outside of opposite-sex couples to opposite-sex couples, whereas not having gender rating with otherwise status quo policies is a large subsidy from women not in opposite-sex couples to men not in opposite-sex couples.
Under status quo policies, opposite sex couples are in practice fairly free to gender-optimize insurance pricing by putting the less expensive to insure driver as primary on the more expensive to insure vehicle, regardless of actual primary driver.
I worked for a car insurance company for ten years and the management would answer, “Because loss history shows that we pay more in claims for insured men.”
So that’s ok but for some reason if it were a particular race they wouldn’t think to charge people
More by race so honestly I don’t know how to answer your question in a logically consistent manner.
But no one said it is was ethical in the case where it is legal, so if that was the intended question, not only is it phrased wrong but it starts from an unsupported premise, to wit, that people in the discussion believe that one is ethical and the other not.
But of course, there could be laws that prohibit linking vehicle insurance cost to gender.
My solution, when I've been married, has been having my wife get insurance, and add me as a driver. But that doesn't matter so much now that I'm older.
Edit: I do agree that discrimination by gender is fundamentally unethical.
Because there is no specific law that bans charging men and women different prices for car insurance. There are specific laws regarding discriminatory advertising with employment and housing.
What if the bias was learned by a neural network or other algorithm (eg historical insurance costs, page rank, ...)? Does that somehow make it legal if they make an inference about a protected class and stop advertising to them?
That kind of thing is why the doctrine of disparate impact was developed. There are a lot of messy edge cases (everything has some correlation with one or another protected class), but if I end up never advertising to men the fact that I'm using a neural network won't protect me.
> That kind of thing is why the doctrine of disparate impact was developed.
It's really not; disparate impact deals with it, but the doctrine was articulated in a case with ample evidence that the policy at issue, though facially neutral, was adopted as a deliberate replacement for explicit racial discrimination with an intent to maintain it's discriminatory effect and without other business purpose, and the doctrine was clearly intended principally to address such veiled-substitute policies.
The doctrine was first articulated in a case (Griggs v. Duke Power Co.) where the Supreme Court explicitly held the employer didn't intend to discriminate.
> the Supreme Court explicitly held the employer didn't intend to discriminate.
The Supreme Court did not hold that, it merely noted that the lower courts had held that, and noted that a lack of discriminatory intent was “suggested” by the Company's efforts to help undereducated employees by financing a major portion of remedial education (part, but not all, of the policy held to be disparate impact was adoption of high school diploma requirements for positions for which such requirements has no substantial relation to job performance.)
The Supreme Court explicitly did not consider whether there was intent to discriminate, because it was not necessary to do so to resolve the case.
So then are algorithmic approaches to advertising for employment off limits? Facebook and google then really shouldn’t go near this kind of work since their tech is legally inappropriate.
> So then are algorithmic approaches to advertising for employment off limits?
Not if what the algorithm optimizes is a measure provably closely linked to job performance.
In fact, as the array of protected classes and the statistical means available will probably over time allow proving prohibited disparate impact for any hiring method other than an algorithmic method optimizing a true job performance measure, algorithmic methods may soon be practically mandatory.
OTOH, algorithmic methods targeting any figure of merit that isn't provably tightly linked to job performance are going to be problematic, sure.
I don't know how it works with Google, but the article says Facebook is building a new ad console specifically for the kinds of advertising where discrimination is illegal. Presumably they'll make sure ads run through it aren't producing any disparate impact. (But note that this wasn't the problem with the cases in the article; in those cases, advertisers were explicitly pressing a "don't send this to women" button.)
Women software engineers are a much smaller percentage of women than male software engineers are of men. That's pretty obvious to anyone who's ever worked in software.
However that is in part because employers have been historically hesitant to employ them (and clearly if they are not advising to women then the will not be getting employment) this creates a self supporting feedback loop.
You say that as if it is fact. Do you have any evidence to support it? I always assumed that it was mainly down to more males taking an interest in the subject. In my career in IT women have always been seen as equals where I have worked. There just aren't many of them.
The wording was unclear to me at first because it wasn’t explicit.
Anyway, I completely changed my comment to more closely go along with the point I want to be making.
Regardless, besides being unfair the idea that the policy is economically justified doesn’t seem to be immediately intuitive to me. It seems like you should advertise on subject matter for that kind of thing, e.g. people who watch EEVBlog would get an advertisement for electrical engineering jobs.
I think the parent comment's logic is sound from a financial point of view, but you do a wonderful job of reframing it to bring it back to an equal rights point of view. Women and older workers have just as much right to the same advertised opportunities as others. Sticking a job ad in the mens restroom or within an age-restricted night club when you're looking for accountants seems misguided, but it's easy to see how that wasn't considered.
Yes, that's true. It seems to be illegal, so talking about ROI is really beside the point. And it's a pretty hypothetical situation. I'm just trying to think why the companies might have taken this approach apart from outright discrimination.
What, in the stretch of American labor history, compels you to think that individual companies need or have ever needed more than "outright discrimination" to do something that is not in their economic best interests?
> “It’s not cost efficient” isn’t a valid reason to discriminate against people, if you ask me.
It's literally the perfect reason to do discrimination. It is just like discriminating for having work experience, education, demonstrably market skills, etc.
We have decided as nations and societies that some forms of economic discrimination are too damaging to permit. The details vary, but typically the things we can't easily change: race, nationality, age etc. Such discrimination is generally outlawed.
Someone lacking relevant market skills or education etc can go out and fix that.
> The details vary, but typically the things we can't easily change: race, nationality, age etc. Such discrimination is generally outlawed.
Also generally perpretrated, by the same body that bans it.
A great beauty about human beings is that they have a natural tendency to find what is best for them and their communities in spite of legalities that attempt to distort reality.
In any case, what you are ascribing as unlawful discrimination is absolutely lawful and you would be naive to believe that there were castings for white asian geriatric women for the role of Black Panther to abide a law about the positively-discriminated groups you mention.
>Someone lacking relevant market skills or education etc can go out and fix that.
Not really, if they lack economic resources, have dependents, have low IQ, low grit, or lots of other reasons.
Ultimately it comes down to what parts of a person you think they are 'responsible for' and what parts they aren't. You're saying that someone being a certain skin color isn't something they should lose opportunities for, but it's okay if they do so for being too dumb to complete and advanced education, even if they were born that way.
My point isn't that you're right or wrong about either of these, but that if you really dig into this you'll find that any such narrative supporting an egalitarian notion that 'people ought to be equal' collapses with a few simple questions about genetics, free will, parenting, intelligence, and other such topics. Nobody gets an equal shot at anything.
You should read the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. None of the things you listed are examples of discrimination in the context
of civil rights. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act.
Perhaps I should also remind you that this isn’t 4chan.
You seem to think the law is the be-all end-all definition of perfect moral reasoning.
The law is not God's word. It's open to criticism, and we're criticizing it. If you want to participate in the discussion, great. But, "It's illegal because the law says you're not allowed to do it," is not a meaningful contribution.
The discussion point was already made above, in that we make certain things illegal because even though it may make economic sense, it results in massive damage to things such as the environment, vulnerable populations and so forth. The poster chose to respond by saying it was a perfectly valid reason to discriminate, which goes against the law for the already stated reasons.
There was no additional criticism offered here. No one has made the point that 'it's the law therefore it's good', and you're massively misrepresenting the arguments here.
And in fact, there are laws against pollution because it's an externality, it doesn't make economic sense to the whole of society. Markets are good at maximising the total good in the case where costs and benefits can be totally internalised. Where you have externalities you see either overprovisioning or underprovisioning and in net, everyone is worse off than the rational outcome. That's where intervention is better than a market by itself.
An analogy to your justification: the most cost efficient thing to do with hazardous chemicals is to dump them down the drain.