On the Digital Society Blog of the HIIG, Matthias C. Kettemann and Alexander Pirang show how job advertisements on online platforms can be made fairer. Twelve international fellows developed these approaches at the virtual clinic of the HIIG.
Read the blog article here (online)
Abstract
Who gets to see what on the internet? And who decides why? These are among the most crucial questions regarding online communication spaces – and they especially apply to job advertising online. Sociologists and development psychologists assure us: You can only be and become what you see. Targeted advertising on online platforms offers advertisers the chance to deliver ads to carefully selected audiences. But what if these criteria – inadvertently or not – further stereotypes? Optimizing job ads for relevance carries risks – from gender stereotyping to algorithmic discrimination. To make digitalization more fair, new approaches to ad delivery are necessary. The spring 2021 Clinic “Increasing Fairness in Targeted Advertising: The Risk of Gender Stereotyping by Job Ad Algorithms” examined the ethical implications of targeted advertising, with the aim to develop fairness-oriented solutions that are ready to be implemented.
Kettemann, M. C.; Pirang, A. (2021): (Un-)Sichtbare Stellenanzeigen: Wie Werbung auf Online-Plattformen fairer werden kann [You Can Only Be What You Can See: How Platforms and Advertisers Can Make Job Ads Algorithms Fairer], Digital Society Blog, 22 March 2021, https://www.hiig.de/en/you-can-only-be-what-you-can-see-how-platforms-and-advertisers-can-make-job-ads-algorithms-fairer/
