When employers pay Google to run ads for job openings on YouTube, Google allowed them to exclude people of “unknown” gender, I uncovered. The employers may not have meant to, but this would ensure that non-binary people wouldn’t see the job ads, raising the specter of illegal discrimination.

I found the job ads in this story by training a machine-learning model to recognize text that’s similar to job ads, then applying that model to the subtitles of YouTube ads (then manually reviewing the “jobbiest” results).