Facebook is accused of showing gender discrimination in its recruitment drive. A group of job seekers is alleging that Facebook helps employers exclude female candidates from recruiting campaigns. The job seekers, in collaboration with the Communications Workers of America and the American Civil Liberties Union, are filing charges with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Facebook and 9 employers.

The employers appear to have used Facebook’s targeting technology to exclude women from the users who received their advertisements, which highlighted openings for jobs like truck driver and window installer. The charges were filed on behalf of any women who searched for a job on Facebook during roughly the past year.

Debra Katz, a Washington-based employment lawyer not involved in the case, said the advertising campaigns appeared to violate federal law, which forbids employers and employment agencies like recruiting firms from discriminating on the basis of gender, among other categories. Some state laws also forbid aiding and abetting discrimination.

Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman, said: “There is no place for discrimination on Facebook; it’s strictly prohibited in our policies. We look forward to defending our practices once we have an opportunity to review the complaint.”
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.

In principle, the companies could have simultaneously aimed similar ads at women, but they do not appear to have done so, according to the lawyers involved. Some 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.

Some employers, responding to similar allegations in the past, have argued that their Facebook ads are only one component of a broader recruiting campaign that is more inclusive, in which they use different media to reach different audiences — including ads on platforms like LinkedIn or Indeed and on other websites or on television.

LinkedIn and Google also allow advertisers to exclude men or women from receiving ads. Both companies said in statements that ads illegally discriminating against members of a protected class violated their policies and were removed when found. LinkedIn said each ad was put through either a manual or algorithmic review process.

In practice, Facebook, with its more than two billion monthly active users, can be the most important tool for reaching certain types of workers, such as hourly workers, who often do not use other platforms like LinkedIn and sometimes do not even have résumés.

Lawyers for the workers in the case argue that Facebook is an employment agency and therefore liable for the discriminatory targeting because it is an active participant in the recruiting campaign rather than a passive publisher of content like a traditional newspaper with a classified section.

Even if Facebook argues successfully that it is not an employment agency, future plaintiffs could bring complaints under state laws, such as California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, which bar aiding and abetting employment discrimination — a more liberal standard.