Facebook Considers Changes to Job Ad Platform That Targeted Gender

Written by
Amy Thomson
Written by

Amy Thomson

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(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. is considering changes to the way its targeted ad platform works in Europe following complaints that its system sends job postings to users based on their gender.

The company's ad platform showed mechanic jobs to men 96% of the time and childcare jobs to women 95% of the time, even though the listings weren't deliberately targeted at a particular gender, according to a complaint from Global Witness, a non-governmental organization that posted the ads. Ads for pilot jobs went to men 75% of the time and 77% of people who were shown an ad for a psychologist position were women, the group said.

“Our system takes into account different kinds of information to try and serve people ads they will be most interested in, and we are reviewing the findings within this report,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “We've been exploring expanding limitations on targeting options for job, housing and credit ads to other regions beyond the U.S. and Canada, and plan to have an update in the coming weeks.”

Global Witness, which said it's submitting complaints to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and the Information Commissioner's Office in the U.K., also found that job openings for positions at Facebook were mainly shown to men between the ages of 25 and 34 in an April 2019 campaign.

Facebook's ad platform has come under fire for discriminatory practices before. A class-action lawsuit targeting Amazon.com Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc., began in 2017, said hundreds of employers in the U.S. tailored their recruitment ads on the social network to people in specific age groups, unfairly excluding older workers.

Read More: Amazon, T-Mobile Say Age-Biased Job Ads Suit Still Lacking

In 2019, the company agreed to change its rules for advertisers to settle a string of lawsuits that accused the platform of enabling housing, credit and employment discrimination. Facebook agreed not to allow housing, employment or credit ads to be targeted at users based on their age, gender or zip codes.