Women see fewer advertisements about entering into science and technology professions than men do. But it’s not because companies are preferentially targeting men—rather it appears to result from the economics of ad sales.
Surprisingly, when an advertiser pays for digital ads, including postings for jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), it is more expensive to get female views than male ones. As a result, ad algorithms designed to get the most bang for one’s buck consequently go for the cheaper eyeballs—men’s. New work illustrating this gap is prompting questions about how that disparity may contribute to the gender gap in science jobs.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Catherine Tucker and London Business School marketing professor Anja Lambrecht conducted a real-world experiment by designing a gender-neutral STEM career ad that she paid to run on the social media Web sites Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as well as through Google’s network for distributing ads across different sites. In each case the platform’s ad algorithm optimized the advertisement so the most people would see it. As a result of that optimization, however, men saw the ad 20 percent more often than women did. The work is slated to be published in Management Science. Tucker also testified about her early findings before a congressional panel last fall.
Women are pricier to reach because they generally make more household purchasing decisions than men do. Marketing algorithms apparently recognize women’s substantial purchasing power and set higher prices for their views. “The problem we identify would apply to any category of advertising product or service—for example, housing, insurance, shoes, health care, jobs in banking. It affects STEM ads…but the economics driving the phenomenon are global—female eyeballs are more expensive and a cost-minimizing algorithm will choose not to show ads to them,” Tucker says.