Amazing that people fall for using LinkedIn with all its issues; but then they fall for using Facebook with all its issues…
She’s not a model. She works for them.
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Neanderthals awaken: there are attractive people who work everywhere. Your reaction says a lot about your perception of reality.
Then why don’t they put her (or any woman at all) in any of their sample profiles, or their team profiles?
At all?
There are like, NO WOMEN on that page, at all.
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As a female developer, I feel like there is a conundrum with this ad here.
There is already sexism in the industry. Masculine traits that have 0 to do with coding are selected for. There is a strong bias against femininity (which I believe others are conflating with “hotness”.) If you’re a femme coder, you pretty much have to be three times better at coding to be considered an equal by male peers.
Given all that, marketing is not exactly known for trying to break these types of stereotypes. Actually, marketing usually enforces stereotypes in the name of demographics and targeted marketing. So I have a hard time believing that this ad was intended as anything other than click-bait for male hiring managers who think she’s pretty, because they’re probably not going to think she’s a top engineer. It’s not the way I want it to be, but it is the way it is.
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I accept that there are attractive women that work everywhere. I don’t accept that a website using a picture of a woman dressed attractively to link to a website full of developer sample profiles that are ONLY MEN and core team members that are also ONLY MEN are using that woman’s picture to show diversity. There are some 100+ pictures on the toptal website and developer profile listing. ZERO of them when I last looked are women.
This is all a viral stunt. And likely, won’t change how many women they place in jobs in this industry.
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I have written to them about that.
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And maybe it is a viral stunt - but it wouldn’t have worked if LinkedIn hadn’t closed down the account because the ad used an image of a woman. Complain all you like about toptal and their sexism, complain about the sexism of advertising, but why did this ad get pulled? The complaint described was not that the ad was not showing a sample of the diversity of the company running the ad, the complaint was not that the ad language was suspicious. The complaint was over the image.
(I didn’t see 100+ photos on the website - I only saw a handful. And the woman in the ad is an employee so she is on the site somewhere too.)
Read the August 4th update on that link. Sounds very innocent, doesn’t it?
In the original article, there were more pictures. The version I saw a few days ago on Hacker News had the current woman and a blonde lady, both of whom were aggrievedly described as Toptal engineers being unfairly objectified by vicious sexists.
Someone in Toptal’s comments pointed out that one of the women pictured did not work for Toptal, was not an engineer, and was in fact a stock photo of an actress. The image then mysteriously vanished, and so did any comment that referred to it. (The “this comment was deleted” hole replying to Drew Miller in the current “best comments” was one such.) The explanatory update didn’t appear until days later, presumably as commenters kept bringing it up and Toptal got tired of deleting them.
I think Toptal is lying. I think they knowingly presented stock photos of pretty women as their employees, and when they were called out they lied, covered up, and hypocritically tried to brand the people who caught them as sexists. And it worked. LinkedIn has let them have all their ads back. (Presumably the ones that were IDed as fake have been hastily removed.)
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I will say that the one remaining woman does appear to be an actual engineer. There’s a link to her resume in the Hacker News thread; I’ll testify that until yesterday it did have a more casual picture of the woman in the article. Since then she appears to have removed her photo from her resume entirely. I really can’t blame her. It’s not her fault that Toptal dragged her into this.
How do you think women should dress in photos so as not to be “directed towards men?”
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A headshot photo of one single person seems out of the ordinary. I place a lot of ads for engineers, managers, PMs, and QA folks, and I have never considered adding photos of just one person, female or male. Maybe a group shot or the company headquarters or workspaces or something, but a single person? Seems strange.
While I agree that the photo is reminiscent of “hot singles in your area” ads, the primary thing they have in common is that they feature a woman. Are women banned from ads because creepy ads featuring women also exist? That is just an unbelievably stupid line of reasoning. The end result of that is that women are only allowed to appear in sex ads. How sexist can you get?
This is incredibly bad from Linkedin. They need to be very publicly shamed for this.
Edit: I wrote this post still assuming that the ads showed engineers working at that company, as they claim. Evidence is mounting that this may be a lie. That would make this a totally different issue, as the company seems to be using hot models to draw attention to their ads. The difficulty in distinguishing between these two situations makes this issue nearly impossible to solve.
Because there’s no way a female engineer can look good? Only ugly girls are good at tech?
I’ve heard some MBA schools offer stereotypes as a major.
OK - so it’s strange to have a head shot as the ad. Why were only the ones of women a problem?
Question - why did people complain about the ads with women - did they know that all the shots with women were not real engineers - why not the shots with men? And then it turns out one of them is a developer?
(and toptal’s blog references the actor head shot - I’m not claiming they are the good guys in this - I’m asking why this happened at all)
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I never saw any ads with men in it, and I actually only saw this one ad with a woman in it when I looked at their blog this morning. I wouldn’t like it if a dude was there anymore than I like the lady ad anyway.
Click bait - yes, probably. It wouldn’t surprise me. But I’m not seeing why that is something LinkedIn users felt the need to report or LinkedIn felt the need to remove…
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Click bait on a email spamming website? That’s a paddlin’.
