Facebook accused of allowing bias against women in job ads

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 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Tuesday 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. The charges were filed on behalf of any 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 ads. For each ad, 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 ad 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 ads between October 2017 and August 2018.

The New York Times contacted three of the employers to inquire about the allegations. Two of them, Renewal by Andersen, which sells and installs windows and doors, and Defenders, which sells and installs home security systems, declined to comment. Nebraska Furniture Mart did not respond.

Some of the companies 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.

LinkedIn and Google also allow advertisers to exclude men or women from receiving ads. LinkedIn said in a statement it would take down job ads that exclude a gender; Google said it would remove ads that discriminated against a protected class but declined to say if it would take down ads like those in the Facebook case. Facebook said that it was still reviewing the ads but that it generally did not take down job ads that exclude a gender.

© 2018 New York Times News Service