Social Networks Assume A Great Deal

Sarah Dopp made a disturbing discovery on Facebook today:

I remove my gender from my facebook profile, and all of a sudden I get ads for startups instead of diets!

It’s staggering to realize all the cultural messages dropped on women. Do advertisers really only see women as “pre-dieting”? Come on Facebook, you can do better. It’s not hard.

But it’s worse than it appears. If you set your profile to genderless, it still hectors you to tell them your gender. I guess they have a lot of diet banner ads they need to display.

More like this: , , .

This entry was written by Bill Humphries and posted on July 10, 2008 at 11:11 pm and filed under culture, technology. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the Atom feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

4 Comments

  1. Kris
    Posted July 11, 2008 at 3:47 pm | Permalink

    I dunno, I get diet ads all the time too, and I am registered as male.

  2. kellan
    Posted July 11, 2008 at 6:50 pm | Permalink

    I get ads for startups, Jasmine get bridal ads, though we’re both listed as engaged :-/

  3. cynthia
    Posted July 11, 2008 at 8:55 pm | Permalink

    Let’s see: gender assumptions up the wazoo sprinkled with large doses of fatphobic crud. Massive fail.

  4. http://liz-henry.blogspot.com/
    Posted July 28, 2008 at 10:41 pm | Permalink

    Hmm, I\’m ungendering on there right now just to see.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*