A female truck driver advocacy organization recently filed a civil lawsuit against Facebook, alleging the social media platform deliberately hides job advertisements from women.
Real Women in Trucking filed the complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, naming Facebook’s parent corporation, Meta, in the suit. The group alleges that Facebook uses its algorithms to steer ads for blue-collar job opportunities away from women and older Americans. These professions include construction, manufacturing, and trucking, among others. The lawsuit also alleges that Facebook’s algorithm has a penchant for hiding higher-paying jobs in these and other fields from women.
“It’s already difficult to find jobs in trucking. Women truck drivers look to Facebook to find reliable information, including job ads,” Desiree Wood, president and founder of Real Women in Trucking, reportedly said. “So, when employers are trying to connect with us and we’re trying to find them and the algorithm is hiding them from us, this creates a problem.”
Wood conducted her due diligence before making the decision to take on one of the world’s largest corporations. She met with labor industry advocates and pulled data from Facebook that is available to the public. An assessment of the social media company’s ad library pointed to a practice known as “algorithm steering” by Facebook.
Discriminatory algorithm steering occurs when an employer purchases an ad for truck drivers in, say, Georgia. The employer sets the ad parameters to appear in the feeds of men and women in the state. But then Facebook posts the ad on the profiles of men 90 percent of the time. Adding to the discrimination claim, only a small percentage of people over 55 years old see the job opportunity. That’s why the Real Women in Trucking lawsuit is based on gender and age discrimination.
“Many companies around the country want to reach people of all ages, women, men, people of all genders. But when Facebook’s algorithm decides who Facebook thinks should see the ad — who Facebook thinks will find the ad most relevant — we have these incredibly skewed outcomes where 1 percent of a lot of blue-collar ads go to women and 99 percent of those ad impressions go to men,” Peter Romer-Friedman, a lawyer representing Real Women in Trucking, reportedly said.
And this isn’t the first time Facebook has come under fire for discriminatory practices. Congress hauled Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in for hearings over First Amendment concerns after wide-reaching conservative users were suspended from the platform. In 2019, Facebook also agreed to stop the practice of including genre- and age-targeting metrics for job advertisements.
“I’ve talked to a lot of employers and their lawyers, and they are mad that they can’t get their ads to an equal group of men and women and people of all genders, all ages. They want to be equal-opportunity employers, but Facebook and Meta are making that impossible,” Romer-Friedman reportedly said.
Sources: fox2now.com, kron4.com
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