ACLU: Facebook is allowing gender-biased job ads on its platform

NEW YORK — Facebook is allowing job ads on its platform that exclude women, according to the American Civil liberties Union.

In a complaint filed Tuesday with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the ACLU lists 10 employers that it says have placed ads on Facebook that violate federal and state discrimination laws. Changes Facebook made to its ads systems this year to prevent discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion and other characteristics didn’t extend to gender, the group said.

Facebook responded quickly, saying that there is “no place for discrimination” on its platform.

The ACLU and the Communications Workers of America say the ads target potential job applicants based on gender. This includes women as well as people who do not identify as either men or women, or “non-binary” people.

The complaint was filed on behalf of three women, living in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois, who allegedly were not shown ads for jobs in traditionally male-dominated fields, even though they appeared qualified for those positions.

The ads, which appeared over the course of several months in 2017 and 2018, were for jobs such as tire salesman, mechanic, roofing worker and security engineer, said Galen Sherwin, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.

The ACLU says that the women, as well as the union’s other female and other non-male members, have “routinely been denied the opportunity” to receive job ads and recruitment on Facebook that their male counterparts received. Targeting job ads by gender is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Facebook already tells advertisers that their ads must not discriminate, or encourage discrimination against people based on “personal attributes such as race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family status, disability, medical or genetic condition.”

But Tuesday’s complaint says Facebook has “long known” that employers and employment agencies were using its platform to discriminate on the basis of gender. Instead of eliminating this behavior, the ACLU said, Facebook has encouraged it.

In addition, while companies can actively choose to exclude women from seeing their ads, a popular Facebook advertising tool called “lookalike audiences” can also lead to similar results, the ACLU said.

It lets advertisers target people who “look like” their existing customer base but are not customers yet. When it comes to job ads, a company can target potential employees with similar characteristics — including gender — to their existing employee base. This, the ACLU said, is illegal.