The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

LinkedIn

LinkedIn under fire after deleting ad posts featuring a woman who was ‘too pretty’

Author

By John Glenday, Reporter

August 5, 2013 | 2 min read

LinkedIn has become embroiled in a sexism row after it deleted an ad post aiming to recruit web engineers after deciding that the woman featured in the ad was ‘too pretty to be a web developer’.

Placed by Toptal, a developer networking platform, the ads were one of a series posted on the business networking site to that end but which were abruptly disabled by moderators without explanation.

The social media platform then issued a request for ‘images related to the product’ but then blocked the ads until the image of Argentinian web developer Florencia Antara had been removed.

Commenting on the episode TopTal CEO Taso Du Val wrote: “Today was a disappointing day at TopTal. We saw extreme sexism within the tech community, from an industry leader and advertising partner that we work with quite extensively: LinkedIn.

“The fact of the matter is: members of the tech community (LinkedIn users) saw it as impossible that our female engineers could actually be engineers, and a leader of the tech community (LinkedIn) agreed with them.

“Unfortunately we're banned from showing anything except 100 percent, all make software advertisements from now on and so, that's what you'll be getting.”

According to The Daily Mail, a spokesperson for LinkedIn blamed the error on a mistake arising from their customer service team and stresses it has now approved the ads for display.

Linkedin contacted The Drum to add the following statement: "While Customer Service was going through a standard process of reviewing LinkedIn Ads, TopTal’s ads were rejected in error. We have taken the necessary measures to approve the previously rejected ads, and TopTal can now run them on our platform as intended."

LinkedIn

More from LinkedIn

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +