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I speak with Ekitzel Wood about online marketing and discrimination in teacher recruitment. Ekitzel tells us how our Facebook information change the job advertisements that we see. We also talk about racism in teacher recruitment and why many schools present a ‘white’ image of their teachers to their customers.
Ethics Discrimination in Online Marketing (With Ekitzel Wood) - Transcription
Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. As you know, usually on the podcast, we speak to people with similar backgrounds to myself, but today, we've got someone from a very different background. That person is Ekitzel Wood.
She specializes in online branding and marketing. She's worked and consulted for many education companies in China about how to improve their brand and find more teachers.
In our conversation, Ekitzel and I talk about marketing messages that work for different groups. On the second half of the podcast, we discuss some of the dangers of online marketing and how this can make discrimination based on race easier.
If you've ever searched for anything in Google, or you've liked a page on Facebook, this affects what job opportunities you see in the future. Even if you don't, this affects who your colleagues are and will be. Enjoy the podcast!
Online Marketing in Education
Ross: Hi, Ekitzel Wood. Thanks so much for coming on.
Ekitzel Wood: Thanks for having me. [laughs]
Ross: Do you mind telling us just very quickly a bit about what you do? You're in education marketing, but you market staff to teachers, right?
Ekitzel: Right. I got my start in social media working for a lot of different companies. I start to quickly specialize in Chinese companies that wanted to have a greater influence and to manage their brands better in North America. Eventually, that parlayed into a very fast‑growing education sector in regards to how to manage their digital brand, what they want to portray themselves as online.
Ross: Maybe that's a good place to start. Like if you're a teacher and you've seen some online social media for school, how would you go about researching that school and finding out, is it legit?
Ekitzel: Coming from the other end is I pose that a lot to schools when they approach me. What type of person do you want to attract? Specifically, one issue for a lot of Chinese English‑training centers is they want to attract more female talent.
This is just a general issue in education globally is that within the domestic markets of any country, education is typically about 65/35 female‑skewed, but once you expatriate that, it flips.
How do you attract or how do you appeal to female educators, or what type of messaging will most resonate with them, especially in terms of...There's a lot of messaging where you focus on having an adventure or trying something new, having access to different areas of the world, meeting new people.
For women, it doesn't work as well unless they're between the ages of 22 and 26. That's the sweet spot for women. For men, that can work up until the age of 39 typically, actually. They're very different, the way they behave.
Ross: What marketing then works for women, say then, over the age of 26 in education or some marketing things that resonate with that group?
Ekitzel: There's two different types of tracks that you can take based on the research that I've done with a few different places.
One is a new‑beginning style track where it's like, "Are you feeling all right?" or "Have you been teaching the same lesson plans for 10 years now? Is it getting tiresome? Do you want to take those skills and then adapt them for new culture, learn about a new place?"
It's about self‑enrichment and about taking your experience and moving it on to something that will challenge you in a new way but won't be too challenging, if that makes sense. So making sure that you apply the side career advancement opportunities that they might have.
If your English training center focus on the fact that you might give them the opportunity to write books or develop curriculum or learn about administration, mentoring, especially, is something that really resonates with a lot of...I know North American long‑term professional teachers that are over the age...They're in their like 20s.
It's a difficult time even to our trained teachers in North America because the attrition rate is quite high. Most teachers in the United States, they leave a teaching profession within five years of starting. The late 20s is a very good time to attract those teachers, to give them an opportunity...
Ross: This is because that a lot of them are thinking they've had it with education at that point. They're already thinking about doing something different, anyway. In some ways, that problem in the domestic market creates an opportunity, that does it?
Ekitzel: Exactly. Not to sound traditional about it, but it is something that, in terms of market research, has proven true, that at that age, if that person is already married, it's very unlikely that they're going to relocate. If that person isn't married, they want to be or they're thinking about it.
It's about 50/50, actually. That's a group that wants...I've tried marketing too with a couple other places, and it's proven not very profitable.
Ross: What are some groups that are maybe the easiest ones to attract, the ones with the highest return on investment for ads?
Ekitzel: Highest return on investment are definitely 23 to 26, male, college educated, one and a half years of spotty experience. They haven't had a solid job after graduating from college. That was a lot easier to do in 2010 to 2012 when the economy wasn't so good in North America. Now, it's not as big of an issue. It's getting harder to recruit that type of talent.
Discrimination in online Education
Ross: A lot of what we talked about so far that has been marketing to specific groups. I want to ask you, if I was a language school owner and I believed that my customers really liked white, blonde teachers aged 28 to 34, is it now impossible for me to engineer something like that where I can deliberately try to attract those people?
Ekitzel: Unfortunately, yes.
Ross: Wow!
Ekitzel: With Facebook, the way it works when you make an ad is you select an audience. That audience is divided by psychographics, which are preferences like pages you follow, interests you see list on Facebook.
This is information you volunteer yourself. You volunteer that information also by liking certain types of content and sharing certain items. That's who you're going to target, so cannot be done by race. It's difficult, but there are ways obviously to do that. Not many white people follow BET, for instance.
Ross: I've done, before, research into hiring practices. It turns out in my research, at least in China, if you have a white photo at the top of your resume, you're 50 percent more likely to get a job than if you have black photo at the top.
That's almost somehow even scarier, that now, it's possible to almost cut out the people that you don't want based on age, ethnicity, interest, and everything. They don't even see the advert in the first place. Of course, like you say, you would hope that language schools eventually would discover that that's not what makes a successful school.
But equally, if the only people that you're going to hire are white, blonde, Aryan people, maybe you never actually find out, because you never have those people from other age groups and ethnicities. You never find out that those people could be equally successful.
Ekitzel: Yes, I know. Not just the companies I've worked for but the entire industry is guilty of this, where they over‑recruit online teachers and especially highly‑qualified teachers from urban areas who are not white. They will keep them active just to the point that they won't leave, but they do deprioritize them in terms of their marketplace.
They have backend ways of tagging them that aren't obvious to the outside observer or to them even as a teacher in their platform. If you say, "I want a teacher who has a specialty in math because I need to improve my English master, engineering vocabulary," they'll search these two terms. Then the first page or two of options will only be these idealized profile.
Ross: I never understand why that happens. I always thought that the great thing about online teaching was that...
Ekitzel: Is the equalizer?
Ross: Yeah, right? It gives students the opportunity to...You can choose whoever you want. If you are racist, or sexist, or whatever, fine.
Ekitzel: That's your choice.
Ross: You can go and choose the Aryan teacher if you want, but if you want to choose the person with the highest star rating based on feedback or the best qualifications, you can search for it however you like.
Ekitzel: The market, especially, in China is highly competitive. The acquisition cost for students is very high. They're doing anything and everything they can to...The thing is, even for them, they do lots of market research where they have quality and experience are the two main drivers for student acquisition. That's what they really care about.
However, unfortunately, behavioral data says something else. I don't know if that's a catch‑22, because a lot of these platforms prioritize towards this idealized image. Are they only selecting those because that's what they're being shown first, like in the first search page, or is that because that's really what they, themselves, prefer?
Ross: It could be a self‑fulfilling prophecy where you choose what you show.
Ekitzel: Right. Because the market is so fierce, no one that I worked with or consulted with has been willing to take that risk.
Ross: If you are a teacher and you maybe already worked on one of these platforms or you're just an employee of one of them, what's a way that you can find out and investigate to what extent your company is promoting an idealized ethnic...?
Ekitzel: Discriminatory...?
Ross: Yes, discriminative and profile for teachers.
Ekitzel: If you work inside of an online teaching platform and you have access to the students' site, how students use the portal or parents use the portal, do some testing. I think you'll find pretty quickly that even when you search very generalized terms, you'll see very little diversity in the first 20 results.
Every company I worked for, that's one of the first concerns I bring up. You can be very successful recruiting teachers. That's your main goal, is quantity of teachers and quality of teachers.
However, I refuse to help you with that unless you start marketing domestically, that you provide teachers that are of non‑white backgrounds, that your billboards, that your online advertising doesn't just have a white face on it, and that has a variety of faces.
Once people start searching for your company and your information, they're not just going to see what's available in United States. They're going to see what's also being promoted in China. They're going to see pictures of subway adverts.
If they see only white people in those subway adverts, they're going to say, "Well, you're only selling white people to Chinese people, so what's you're saying you're a diverse welcoming country?" That's hypocritical.
Ross: I wonder what the reason is, what's the underlying thing that causes this racism. On discrimination, I've read before about how people of color were discriminated against in customer‑facing jobs, but in management‑facing jobs basically suffered almost no discrimination.
The background to that seem to be that companies were worried that their customers were racist. They prefer to have a white person or beautiful person or whatever, but it was like the recruiters, themselves, didn't actually have a preference.
What I wonder is here, is it people in these companies actually feel that way, or they just worry that this is how our customers feel? Do they think like, "I really believe white teachers are better," or is it like, "I really think that our customers are kind of racist. I'm going to discriminate on their behalf"?
Ekitzel: I think it's a little bit of both. I'm a big follower of Brené Brown. [laughs] She's a social worker, just had talks and things like that. She tells the story about her own experience where she was waiting on the line at a bank. There's a teller. He was black.
There's an older white lady in front of her. She was getting really upset. Something was wrong, and she's like, "I want to speak to your manager." Brené was behind of this awful lady. He's like, "OK," so he brings the manager who also happens to be a black woman. She's like "No, I need another manager."
Ross: Wow.
Ekitzel: She was so angry. She got upset. She's just like, "That lady was crazy." The teller was beyond professional. He's just like, "She's just worried about her money, and she's afraid. When people are afraid, they don't make the best choices."
I think, especially in terms of business development, in a hypercompetitive market of English education in China, they know that it doesn't really matter, but they're afraid because they might lose one or two families. That, to them, could be a big difference in their profit margin.
Everyone's trying to sell to the lowest common denominator. They think that if this will change five percent of the people's minds if they see a black person there because it spooks them or it scares them, then they'll make this safer "choice."
Ross: It's better to do something that's going to appease the racist five percent, because for the other 95 percent, they don't care.
Ekitzel: They don't care. Unless they are the ones not being represented, they'll just become more complacent what the imagery they're seeing.
Ross: Thanks so much for coming along.
Ekitzel: Oh, thank you.
Ross: Do you have a blog, or a Twitter handle, or something that you'd recommend people to go to?
Ekitzel: I don't have a lot of professional social media for myself.
Ross: That's ironic.
Ekitzel: You're welcome to follow me on Twitter. It's @ekitzel. That's my Twitter handle.
Ross: Awesome. Thanks again.
Ekitzel: Thank you.
Ross: Cool.