SAN FRANCISCO – According to a complaint filed Tuesday at the Equal Opportunities Commission on Jobs, employers are using Facebook to target only job offers aimed at men, at the same time. exclusion of women and any other person identified as another sex.

The complaint, the first step before filing a discrimination complaint, is brought against Facebook and nine employers on behalf of three women who claim that the ad filtering has prevented them from seeing job offers in predominantly male-dominated fields. including construction, trucking and software. All the job offers cited in the complaint except one were also aimed at young workers.

"I should not be prevented from hearing about an employment opportunity just because I am a woman," said Linda Bradley, a job seeker and complainant, in a statement on Tuesday's complaint.

Facebook is also named in the complaint "because it creates the mechanisms by which employers can choose to target their ads illegally based on their gender and age," says Galen Sherwin, Senior Counsel for the Women's Rights Project. ACLU. said in USA today.

Spokesperson Joe Osborne said that Facebook had not yet considered the EEOC complaint.

"There is no room for discrimination on Facebook, it's strictly forbidden in our policies," he said in an email. "We are eager to defend our practices."

Users must select their gender when opening a Facebook account, thus opening the door to employers who target job offers based on their gender. Facebook users can click on the ads to see why they see them. For example, an announcement by Defenders home security company published in 2017 stated: "DEFENDERS Careers wants to reach men between the ages of 20 and 40".

Facebook's ability to target messages to specific groups of people makes it an increasingly popular way for employers to reach employment prospects, particularly through the use of Facebook. targeted ads. A 2016 study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 66% of employers who recruit on social media use Facebook. In 2017, Facebook created tools for companies to publish job offers and job seekers to search for new gigs.

Under US law, companies are prohibited from discriminating against recruitment and hiring and from adapting job offers to a specific gender or age group. Last year, the US Communications Workers' Union filed a California class action suit alleging that Facebook allowed discrimination against older workers by excluding them from bids. employment.

The three women bear the complaint of the EEOC – Bobbi Spees, a native of a small town in McKean County, Pennsylvania, Linda Bradley, who was recently fired from a drug center. calls from Franklin County in Ohio and Renia Hudson from Chicago unemployed for two years – were denied employment opportunities because employers targeted all or part of their Facebook ads solely on men, according to the complaint filed Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Outten & Golden law firm and the CWA.

Spees, 35, works part-time in the field of special education, but has been looking for a full-time job online and offline for a year and a half, despite having a master's degree in education and extensive experience, particularly in a container factory. She was surprised to learn that employers could target men and prevent women from seeing job offers on Facebook.

"I know I can do many, many things," she said. "I do not want my kids to grow up thinking you can not do a job because you're not a man or because you're a woman." I think it's important that it show up and that things become righteous. "

Job seekers worry about the fairness of ads on Facebook at a time when the Silicon Valley company is already increasingly being watched by lawmakers, regulators and users alike. Public trust in Facebook ads is crucial to the giant social network, which derives the bulk of its money from spreading messages from marketers to more than 2 billion users.

The controversial means of demography of jobseekers can be questioned. Facebook's advertising tools have allowed Russian agents to Sow the political division on hot social issues during and after the 2016 presidential election and allow advertisers to target ads in an offensive manner, for example on "hate Jews" and to post ads only to whites. Facebook educates advertisers on their legal responsibilities and requires them to certify that they adhere to laws prohibiting discrimination.

The company's vice president of ads, Rob Goldman, defended this type of advertising targeting last year, saying it was similar to magazine or television advertising to attract specific demographics.

"Simply showing some job postings to different age groups on services like Facebook or Google may not be discriminatory in itself – just as it may be okay to run job ads in magazines a blog post .

Last December, three workers and CWA sued companies, including T-Mobile and Amazon, alleging that they were using Facebook's ad targeting tools to exclude former Americans from job opportunities. This lawsuit found that hundreds of employers and employment agencies filter their ads by gender, race and age when they seek to fill open positions.

In an amended version of the May complaint, CWA alleged that Facebook encourages advertisers to exclude certain job seekers by providing them with age filters and regularly updated data on ad performance with different groups of advertisers. 'age. The union also claims that Facebook targets job ads to "similar audiences", similar to those already working at the employer, which further complicates the job of older workers.

The law generally protects Internet companies like Facebook from any liability for content placed on their sites by third parties, but it is unclear if this will happen in the California case or in the complaint filed Tuesday by EEOC.

USA TODAY contacted the nine companies named in the complaint. They included the software company Abas USA, which ran advertisements for sales staff; Nebraska Furniture Mart, who wanted to hire staff in Texas to assemble the goods to be delivered; the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, which recruited police officers; Rice Tire, who was looking for a mechanic in Maryland; Xenith, a manufacturer and retailer of athletic equipment, was looking for sales and sports marketing specialists; JK Moving Services, which was in the driver market; Enhanced Roofing & Remodeling, which sought to hire an estimator; and the Need Work Today employment agency, which places workers in the sectors of agriculture, construction, trucking and aviation. Eight of them did not answer.

Renewal by Andersen, who placed ads on Facebook to hire window installers, declined to comment on the details of the complaint filed by EEOC. "We are an equal opportunity employer and we are proud of the diversity of our workforce," the company said in a statement sent by email.

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