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Study: Facebook delivers biased job ads, skewed by gender

Facebook Biased Job Ads
Posted at 3:15 PM, Apr 09, 2021
and last updated 2021-04-09 17:15:50-04

Facebook is showing different job ads to women and men in a way that might run afoul of anti-discrimination laws, according to a new study.

University of Southern California researchers who examined the ad-delivery algorithms of Facebook and LinkedIn found that Facebook's were skewed by gender beyond what can be legally justified by differences in job qualifications.

Men were more likely to see Domino's pizza delivery driver job ads on Facebook, while women were more likely to see Instacart shopper ads.

The trend also held in higher-paying engineering jobs at tech firms like Netflix and perpetuated the existing gender breakdown at those companies.

According to The Associated Press, more women saw ads for Netflix than for chipmaker Nvidia, "which parallels the gender breakdown in each company’s workforce."

The AP reported that researchers didn't find any evidence of Linkedin using a similar bias in the job ads.