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 U.S. 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.

The disclosure for the problematic ads said the users received them because they were men.

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.