Please see below for an example of the type of case studies we are looking at. This one, The Lakeview Times, was crowdsourced with contributions from many folks in our monthly working group (please email lenore.cowen@tufts.edu if you made contributions or edits and want co-authorship credit when it is published). This is fiction (there is no such newspaper), and the length is approximately what we want. When these cases are published, there will be 3 expert opinions/commentary attached to each one. You are welcome to submit cases for consideration for our collection with or without draft expert opinions: if we accept your case, it will be assigned undergraduate students from the Lantern (special interest group in Ethics) to help solicit others to write expert opinions and/or help you revise and edit.

Anna Remy and George Plune came out of their meeting with  Laura Kwon, the representative for the Brookstar Scholarship Program. Brookstar was one of their advertisers at the Lakeview Times: the 50 year old program, endowed by the estate of the Brookstar family, offered small college scholarships to area residents who were majoring in STEM fields. Laura was not very happy with their newspaper: “We got a list of all the people who clicked on our ad in the past month, and 100 percent of them, at least 100 percent of the ones whose gender we thought we could identify based on their first name, were male. Why are we not attracting more women? What are we doing wrong?” It was a good question. Anna looked at the banner ad that Brookstar had provided. It displayed smiling students of different backgrounds, and there were definitely women in the picture. It looked appealing. It said there was scholarship money, and that many local students had qualified. She knew that more men than women coming out of high school tended to believe that they would choose a STEM field for their college major, but 100 percent sounded very high. Why were no women clicking on the ad?

The next day, George came into Anna’s office. “You are not going to like this,” he said. “It’s about the Brookstar account. I passed the information to Nina in our advertising department, and she looked at the data. It turns out that 100 percent of the people we showed the Brookstar Scholarship ad to were men (or at least, our backend office thought they were men, based on our databases or their first names). We never showed the scholarship ad to any women.” Anna was appalled, “Did we decide that women shouldn’t get that ad, or did that new AI system you installed decide that?” “Neither,” said George. “We always serve the ad that will give us the most money, for example, if Toller Groceries buys 250 impressions at 8 cents an impression, and Mike’s Auto buys 300 impressions at 5 cents an impression, we will always show the Toller Grocery ad until we reach the 250 impressions. Only then will we start serving Mike’s Auto ads. The Brookstar Scholarship Program is a charity, so we gave them a very discount rate; we only get 3 cents an impression when we serve their ad, so their ads are lower priority.” 

“During the same period when we were showing the Brookstar Scholarship ad, we also had Rainbow Togs as an advertiser. Rainbow Togs makes women’s clothes, and would pay us 8 cents an impression for showing their ad to women who came to the Lakeview Times website. They bought a huge number of views– we still haven’t run out.  So if a woman reader came to the website, we showed her the Rainbow Togs ad, because they paid more for women customers than Brookstar did. When a male reader came to our website, Rainbow Togs would not pay us to show their shopping ad, so we showed the cheaper Brookstar Scholarship ad.” 

Anna frowned. “I guess that solves the mystery,” she said, “and I agree that showing the ad that makes us the most money is not obviously a sexist policy on the part of the Lakeview Times. But the result in this case seems terrible and  sexist, and I don’t like it. Only men got to learn about this amazing STEM scholarship opportunity on our site; women were instead shown an ad for clothes.   I think we should change our policy in this case and show the Brookstar Scholarship ad to women too, even if it makes us less money.” “I support you in this,” said George. “But I also wonder what else we might be missing?”