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FB accused of allowing bias against women in job advertisements

Posted in Featured, World

Published on September 22, 2018 with No Comments

Facebook has been criticized in recent years over revelations that its technology allowed landlords to discriminate on the basis of race, and employers to discriminate on the basis of age. Now a group of job seekers is accusing Facebook of helping employers to exclude female candidates from recruiting campaigns.

The job seekers, in collaboration with the Communications Workers of America and the American Civil Liberties Union, filed charges with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Facebook and nine employers.

The employers appear to have used Facebook’s targeting technology to exclude women from the users who received their advertisements, which highlighted openings for jobs like truck driver and window installer. The charges were filed on behalf of many women who searched for a job on Facebook during roughly the past year.

The lawyers involved in the case said they discovered the targeting by supervising a group of workers who performed job searches through their Facebook accounts and clicked on a variety of employment advertisements. For each advertisement, the job seekers opened a standard Facebook disclosure explaining why they received it. The disclosure for the problematic ads said the users received them because they were men, often between a certain age and in a certain location.

For example, the Facebook disclosure for an advertisement by Nebraska Furniture Mart of Texas seeking staff members to “assemble and prepare merchandise for delivery” said the company wanted to reach men 18 to 50 who lived in or were recently near Fort Worth. The lawyers and their team collected the advertisements between October 2017 and August 2018. In principle, the companies could have simultaneously aimed similar ads at women, but they do not appear to have done so, according to the lawyers involved. Some conceded that they had directed the ads only at men and some promised to stop doing so, according to Peter Romer-Friedman, counsel at Outten & Golden, one of the lawyers in the case.

 

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