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ACLU Claims Facebook Allows Companies to Advertise Jobs to Only Young Men

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A fake Facebook ad for a sexist job listing

Thanks to Facebook’s targeting, I never would have seen this ad.

 

Most companies claim they want more women in tech, but don’t do anything to improve their own dismal numbers. They won’t improve health care options for women, maternity leave, fertility care, offer free sanitary products, combat sexist behavior in the office, or educate interviewers on unconscious bias. As a result, companies continue to hire fewer women in technical roles than men, even when accounting for the available applicant pool.

While more women are entering the workforce with computer science degrees, we haven’t seen an uptick in companies hiring women for technical roles. In fact, most companies have under 20% of their engineering workforce made up of women, many are under 15%. Yet, according to Advanced Placement tests in high school, women with an interest in computer science should account for at least 25% of these employees as of 2014. Excluding technical roles, women still don’t account for 50% of employees at tech companies.

The workforce is full of qualified women who can’t find jobs at tech companies.

We can mostly attribute this to performance bias and toxic workplaces. Performance bias disproportionately scrutinizes women’s skills throughout their careers, from the interview to promotions. It’s why women have to work harder for entry level roles, and are frequently overqualified for their positions. Toxic workplaces, like those at Riot Games, Uber, and Google, push women out of the industry they love. Microaggressions, lousy benefits that cater to men, and sexist attitudes push women into other careers.

However, this bias extends to recruitment process. The ACLU has discovered evidence of sexist and ageist bias in Facebook’s advertising platform for jobs. Facebook has permitted companies to advertise job listings only to young men, pushing women and older programmers away from these positions.

ACLU’s Claim

The Civil Rights Act prohibits advertising job roles exclusively to men. However, Facebook allowed companies to do just that. When you place an advertisement on Facebook, you can choose who you target with the ad. You can use demographics, personal information, interests derived from their likes and posts, and more. However, when that advertisement is for a job posting, Facebook should prevent a person’s gender or age from being a targeting parameter. They haven’t.

Instead, a company could go on Facebook, take out an advertisement for a job role, and only show that advertisement to young men. If they do nothing else for recruitment, they’ve all but guaranteed they’d hire a young man instead of a woman or older candidate. They’re discriminating against marginalized groups before the interview process even begins, and Facebook has enabled it.

These companies, with Facebook’s help, have committed a crime, but it took considerable time before anyone realized what they were doing. Facebook’s inaction has allowed damage to countless careers. How many women and older engineers were turned away from jobs before they even got a chance to apply?

Facebook’s Response

Facebook thumbs downFacebook’s response was hollow, a standard for the company. They state that their policies prohibit discrimination. However, they didn’t state whether or not this kind of discrimination is actually prevented in practice or what they’d do to prevent it in the future. Instead, they stated that they “look forward to defending our practices.”

In the past, Facebook faced a similar problem. Their advertising platform allowed advertisers to target people of a particular race. The Department of Housing and Urban Development found that housing ads could target only white people, excluding racial minorities. This isn’t the first time Facebook has faced discrimination charges, and proves they learned nothing from their first lesson.

It doesn’t sound as though Facebook wants to improve anything at the company.

Ageism and Sexism in Tech

“To put these numbers into perspective, a male surgeon would have to have three patient deaths to be treated the same as a female surgeon.”
– Heather Sarsons in her paper on bias against female surgeons
Sexism and ageism are pervasive in tech. Older engineers are pushed out, accused of having no fresh ideas, without being offered the opportunity to prove their relevance. Even older engineers who regularly push their team forward are regularly face ridicule from their coworkers for their age.
Full article: https://www.cnet.com/news/women-in-tech-the-numbers-dont-add-up/

Why are none of these remotely close to 50%? Infograph via Cnet

When it comes to sexism in tech, the issues are so multifaceted that they’re difficult to list. Tech companies offer women less pay for the same work and scrutinize their mistakes more heavily in all scientific fields. Male surgeons, for example, need to make mistakes leading to the deaths of three patients before primary care physicians treat them as poorly as female surgeons. In tech, this translates to grueling interview processes that end in interviewers questioning female applicants’ skills more than male candidates. They claim “poor culture fits” for women engineers who don’t fit the profile of “young male geek.” Managers ask women to take care of social events in the office, or taking notes during meetings. These small microaggressions add up to coworkers and managers belittling the work of women, thinking less of their accomplishments, and punishing them more for their mistakes. It’s why we see so few women in senior engineering roles or management.

Tech’s Future and the U.S. Economy

The tech industry is facing an issue of stagnation. Cellphones are boring, large social networks unchallenged (despite obvious flaws), and huge swaths of the internet have become toxic wastelands for harassment. Part of this issue is the lack of diversity in tech. Diverse people introduce and promote diverse ideas. Women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and older engineers have much to contribute, but companies haven’t given them the same opportunities of cisgender, heterosexual, young, white men. Until we address these inequalities, tech will continue to be a homogeneous and toxic place, and innovation will suffer. As world economies further rely on technological innovation, this will be an area where the United States could thrive, if the nation could abandon its sexist, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic biases. Looking at this example of discrimination on Facebook, or even our most recent elections, these changes don’t appear to be on the horizon.

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