Yahoo Finance Facebook accused of discriminating against women with targeted job adverts
Facebook is discriminating against women by helping employers run job adverts that target only men, civil rights campaigners have claimed.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a charge with the US labour equality watchdog alleging that Facebook “consciously encouraged” employers to exclude women from their recruitment.
It named 10 employers including a roofing firm, a home security vendor and a tyre repair chain which it said had used Facebook’s powerful ad targeting tools to illegally advertise only to men or to young people.
“In creating and carrying out these targeting mechanisms, Facebook has created and profited from a powerful tool for discrimination against female and other non-male job applicants,” the charge alleges.
“Facebook has long known that employers and employment agencies were using its platform to discriminate on the basis of gender, and [has] encouraged that behavior, rather than eliminating it.”
Facebook’s targeting features, which let advertisers limit their adverts to specific demographics and appeal to or exclude precise interest groups such as "strong single moms", are the foundation of its gigantic profit margins.
But they have also repeatedly come under fire for letting employers, landlords and election campaigns target or bypass demographic groups.
Earlier this year the company removed more than 5,000 options to exclude users based on sensitive interests such as “passover”, “evangelism”, “Islamic culture” and “Buddhism”.
Since 2016 it has progressively disabled the ability to exclude users by “ethnic affinity”after government investigators and journalists used it to buy housing, restaurant and insurance adverts that discriminated against black and Hispanic users.
In its charge, the ACLU says Facebook’s role went beyond “that of an intermediary”. Rather, “Facebook performs nearly all the necessary functions of an employment agency and marketing firm” by collecting users’ data and encouraging advertisers to target those "who matter most to your business".
One advert, from the police department of Greensboro, North Carolina, shows two male officers posing next to motorbikes, with a note that “you’re seeing this ad because City of Greensboro wants to reach men ages 25 to 35”. Another shows a male roofer on a ladder and says it is targeted at “men ages 21 to 55 who live or were recently in in Maryland”.
Facebook encourages this discrimination. It has created the architecture through which employers are able to do this.
Galen Sherwin, ACLU
If the women and non-binary workers it represents had seen such ads, the charge says, the would have clicked on them, but instead were excluded. Galen Sherwin, a senior ACLU lawyer, said most of the companies had been asked to show that they ran parallel adverts targeting women, but that they had failed to do so.
In response, Facebook said it proactively checked that adverts aren’t discriminatory, that it was reviewing the case and that it would defend its practices.
“There is no place for discrimination on Facebook,” said a spokesman. “It’s strictly prohibited in our policies, and over the past year, we’ve strengthened our systems to further protect against misuse.”
Previously the company has argued that simply targeting job adverts to age groups is not in itself discriminatory because it might be part of a wider, more inclusive campaign.
It already uses both AI and humans to determine whether an advert falls under discrimination law and requires such advertisers to tick a box saying they will not use Facebook adverts “for any discriminatory practices”. An upgraded version is being planned for all advertisers soon.
But Ms Sherwin said Facebook must completely remove the ability of employers, landlords and loan companies to target by gender or age, as well as the ability to use interests and hobbies as a proxy for gender or age.
