Welcome to Silicon Valley, ladies!
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.
As many companies, we run LinkedIn advertisements to acquire new companies, clients, developers and internal employees. We run a mixture of male and female advertisements. We've taken extremely professional photos of both men and women who are part of the Toptal network and made sure they looked sharp, well dressed and happy; however, LinkedIn's internal advertising's staff completely disagrees that they both look sharp, well dressed and happy. Actually, they believe, with 100% certainty, that the women in our advertisements are offensive and harmful to their user base. To me, this is unbelievable. …
Our COO went ahead and said we promise not to show any females in our advertisements and asked for a phone call. After we responded, we got the following:
"Hi [Toptal], Thank you for your confirmation. I went ahead and removed the restriction from your ads account. Please feel free to edit the ads and submit them again.
LinkedIn is an emulsifying agent between the business's meritocratic pretensions and the reality of its labor market. Think on the sort of people who use it enough to complain about the "women images" there. Imagine going to their parties! Imagine being privy to their inner lives. What do you expect from these people, Toptal? Advertise somewhere else.
