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To tech-bros, your pregnancy is an advertising opportunity

Silicon Valley has a woman problem. The tech industry is notorious for its gender disparity and despite lots of talk about “diversity”, companies like Google and Facebook have made little progress in stamping out gender bias, nor in recruiting and retaining more female engineers.

This affects all of us every single day. When the algorithms that govern increasingly large parts of our lives have been designed almost exclusively by young bro-grammers with homogeneous experiences and worldviews, those algorithms are going to fail significant sections of society.

A heartbreaking example of this is Gillian Brockell’s experience of continuing to get targeted by pregnancy-related ads on Facebook after the stillbirth of her son. Brockell, a Washington Post journalist, recently made headlines when she tweeted an open letter to big tech companies, imploring them to think more carefully about how they target parenting ads.

“Please, Tech Companies,” she wrote. “If you’re smart enough to realize that I’m pregnant, that I’ve given birth, then surely you’re smart enough to realize that my baby died, and can advertise to me accordingly, or maybe, just maybe, not at all.”

After Brockell’s letter went viral, Facebook’s vice-president of advertising, Rob Goldman, apologized to Brockell on Twitter. He also patronizingly pointed out that she could have avoided the situation if only she’d taken the time to navigate Facebook’s ever-changing settings and tweaked her ad preferences. “We have a setting available that can block ads about some topics people may find painful – including parenting,” he explained. Brockell, it should be noted, did go on to block parenting ads … and immediately started getting ads from adoption agencies. (“And no, I have not been googling about adoption,” she tweeted. “I am miles away from anything but grieving.”)

Goldman’s interactions with Brockell on Twitter make clear he sees her painful experience as the sad result of an isolated “bug”. “I would like to debug how this ad was shown,” he told her, “so we can improve the way this control works.” But, of course, it’s not an isolated bug or flawed algorithm that is responsible: it’s Silicon Valley’s ethics-free, male-centric culture.

It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your algorithms are, when you treat pregnancy as an advertising event, an opportunity to be monetized, you will get situations like this. When your engineers consist largely of twentysomething dudes, you will get situations like this. When you think about your users as data-points rather than thinking, feeling, complex human beings, you will get situations like this. Facebook is always going on about connecting people; bringing people closer together. But as Brockell’s experience makes abundantly clear, it seems to have very little understanding of people at all.

Japanese medical schools excluded female applicants

A government investigation has found that at least nine Japanese medical schools manipulated exam results in favour of male candidates. Juntendo University said that they did this for purely benevolent reasons. “Women mature faster mentally than men, and their communication ability is also higher by the time they take the university exam,” the dean told reporters. “In some ways, this was a measure to help male applicants.” Ah, that’s OK then.

Putting a price on rape

Jacob Walter Anderson, a former fraternity president at Baylor University accused of rape, will not face any jail time after accepting a plea deal. Anderson, who was charged with four counts of sexual assault, after a 19-year-old student accused him of assaulting her at a fraternity party, will have to pay a $400 fine and go to counselling. His light sentence has provoked outrage, and sparked renewed conversation about how difficult it is to prosecute sexual assault cases.

Women make movies $$$

Movies with a female lead perform better at the box office than those lacking the xx factor, according to a new study by Creative Artists Agency’s digital strategy firm, shift7. The study also found that films that passed the Bechdel test do better at the box office than those that don’t.

A feminist proposal

If Pinterest is anything to go by (and it probably isn’t) a lot of women are going to be proposing to their partners this engagement season. Searches for “Women propose to men ideas” are apparently up 336% this year. And searches for “unique lesbian proposals” are up 1,352%.

Weekend reads