Facebook could be bypassing the United States employment law as several U.S. officials are accusing the tech giant firm of hiding job advertisements from women, even if they are qualified for the offered positions.
Some critics and other experts said that this Facebook activity is sexual discrimination. The new audit was conducted by independent researchers from the University of Southern California or USC. They revealed that the social media giant’s ad-delivery system shows different job posts and ads to women and men.
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The accusation for Facebook is currently alarming since they are hiding jobs that women need, even though these ads are showing the same qualifications for both genders. The activity of the social media app is now considered sex-based discrimination under U.S. equal employment opportunity law.
This policy’s goal is to ban ad targeting based on protected characteristics. the study’s results came after Facebook promised that it will change its way of delivering its advertisements to provide a more fair environment for all genders.
Why Facebook is accused
The involved researchers in the study registered an advertiser on Facebook. It released a pair of ads for jobs with identical qualifications. But, these two advertisements have different real-world demographics. The first one is expected to find a driver for Domino’s pizza delivery. Meanwhile, the second ad’s goal is to look for a delivery employee for Instacart. The only difference between the two is that Domino currently has more men than women for their delivery driver positions.
The experts found that the social media platform hides Domino’s ad from women because of the company’s pattern. On the other hand, the researchers also did the same strategy for Nvidia, Netflix, and other businesses, as well as companies.
They also have the same results for the companies that are more likely to hire men over women. The new study explained that these findings show that the social media platform’s algorithms are somehow picking up on the current demographic distribution of these jobs, which usually differ for historical reasons.
Has FB changed its ad system?
The new study shows that the social media platform hasn’t resolved its ad discrimination until now. This issue was already brought up by ProPublica way back in October 2016. During the year, ProPublica revealed that the tech giant platform allowed advertisers of housing and job opportunities to exclude certain audiences characterized by traits. These include gender, race, and more.
On the other hand, the social media platform’s critics and analysts said that it took years before the tech giant removed several illegal features from its platform. However, a few months later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) levied a new lawsuit, accusing Facebook’s ad-delivery algorithms were still excluding audiences for housing ads without the advertiser specifying the exclusion.
Piotr Sapieżyński, one of the researchers involved in the study, said that “the design of the experiment is very clean.” He added that “These gender differences cannot be explained away by gender differences in qualifications or a lack of qualifications.”
Right now, the social media platform hasn’t confirmed yet if it is already working on the current ad discrimination issue. But, people should still expect that this might take a few years until it is finally resolved.
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