[rspeer]

Can confirm. I actually went and specifically informed a couple of ad-targeting networks that I'm a woman, in the cases where they allow that, around when I was updating many other people and institutions. That helped on some fronts.

So now some of the ad targeting networks have me targeted as "woman who's a successful professional and knows what she's doing in life", which, uh, is correct up until that last part.

The robots are just not expecting a woman in her thirties to still be baffled and overwhelmed by fashion and looking for the basics. I get my most useful recommendations by word of mouth, and yay, that sounds very nice and authentic, but it's a slow process.

So this is a different problem than the original article: we could be targeted _better_ and both we and the advertisers would be happy, for at least a moment.

But. We're trusting the advertisers to use that information responsibly. What if the kind of people who make those anti-trans reply videos on YouTube start taking out deliberately divisive ads, targeted at the trans community? On balance, I think it might be better for the ad networks to not quite understand.

[itronitron]

It's really shocking how terrible the selection is for professional clothing for women, it's almost like clothing manufacturers have gotten together to ensure everything fits poorly and doesn't coordinate with anything in order to drive up sales. It seems they can only get it right when it comes to designing yoga pants.