Facebook has been accused of allowing sexist work to be advertised and of violating the equality law.
The Global Witness campaign group claims that the tech giant has a biased algorithm that determines who will see a job posting and fails to crack down on discrimination.
The group conducted an experiment in which it sent two job postings to Facebook for approval and asked that one not be shown to women and that others not be shown to anyone over 55 years of age.
Facebook was said to approve both ads for posting.
However, he asked Global Witness to tick a box saying it would not discriminate against applicants to whom it did not want to advertise.
Activists did not post the ads.
Her research also found that 96% of people who showed an ad for mechanic jobs on Facebook were men and 95% of people who showed an ad for childcare jobs were women.
It states that 75% of those who displayed ads for pilot jobs were men and 77% of those who displayed ads for psychologist jobs were women.
Naomi Hirst, head of Global Witness’s Digital Threats campaign, said:
“It ‘s really shocking that Facebook’ s own algorithm to target job ads in such a discriminatory way has come up.
“Target ads for nursery workers for women and mechanic jobs for men: in what century do you think Facebook lives ?!”
He added: “The line of work for Facebook’s workplace culture is“ Move fast. Be brave. Be yourself.’
But clearly, this only applies if ‘being yourself’ means being a man between the ages of 25 and 34, as he is the person most likely to receive job postings from the social media company.
“This seems very unfair to more than 40% of Facebook users who are women and to the majority who fall outside this age range.”
“We are reviewing the findings of this report,” according to a Facebook spokesman.
Although the experiment was conducted in the UK, the subject is not said to be unique to one country.
Global Witness says Algorithm Watch and academics have shown that Facebook’s ad serving algorithm is “highly discriminatory when it comes to posting job ads in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States.”
Barrister Schona Jolly, QC, examined the evidence from the campaign group and wrote the Global Witness statement to the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission on the subject.
She said: “Facebook’s own system can, and does, seem to lead to discriminatory results.”
A Facebook spokesperson told us: “Our system takes into account different types of information to try to deliver ads to people who will be most interested in them and we are reviewing the findings of this report.
“We’ve been exploring the extension of targeting options for job, housing, and credit ads to other regions beyond the United States and Canada, and we plan to have updates in the coming weeks.”