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.

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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. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
  • Hmm, I\'m ungendering on there right now just to see.
  • Let's see: gender assumptions up the wazoo sprinkled with large doses of fatphobic crud. Massive fail.
  • I get ads for startups, Jasmine get bridal ads, though we're both listed as engaged :-/
  • Kris
    I dunno, I get diet ads all the time too, and I am registered as male.
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