Facebook Accused of Showing Gender-Biased Job Advertisements
Facebook users may not be learning about jobs they are qualified for because the company’s tools may disproportionately target ads to a particular genre “beyond what can be legally justified,” university researchers said in a published study. on Friday.
According to the study, in one of three examples that generated similar results, Facebook targeted an Instacart delivery job ad to an audience with large numbers of women and a Domino’s Pizza delivery job ad to a large audience. a number of men.
Instacart has mostly female drivers and Domino’s mostly male, according to a study by researchers from the University of Southern California.
By contrast, Microsoft’s LinkedIn showed Domino’s delivery job ads to roughly the same proportion of women as the Instacart ad.
“Facebook ad delivery may result in bias in job ad delivery by gender beyond what can be legally justified by potential differences in qualifications,” the study said. The finding reinforces the argument that Facebook’s algorithms may violate US anti-discrimination laws, he added.
Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said the company has “a lot of signals to try to show ads to the people who are most interested in them, but we understand the concerns raised in the report.”
Amid lawsuits and regulatory investigations into discrimination through ad targeting, Facebook has tightened controls to prevent customers from excluding some groups from viewing job, housing, and other ads.
But researchers remain concerned about bias in artificial intelligence (AI) software when choosing which users see an ad. Facebook and LinkedIn said they study their AI for what the tech industry calls “fairness.”
LinkedIn Vice President of Engineering Ashvin Kannan said the study results “align with our own internal review of our job posting ecosystem.”
She is a freelance blogger, writer, and speaker, and writes for various entertainment magazines.