Facebook Shows Men and Women Different Job Ads, Study Finds
April 09 2021 - 8:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Jeff Horwitz
Facebook Inc. disproportionately shows certain types of job ads
to men and women, researchers have found, calling into question the
company's progress in rooting out bias in its algorithms.
The study led by University of Southern California researchers
found that Facebook systems were more likely to present job ads to
users if their gender identity reflected the concentration of that
gender in a particular position or industry. In tests run late last
year, ads to recruit delivery drivers for Domino's Pizza Inc. were
disproportionately shown to men, while women were more likely to
receive notices in recruiting shoppers for grocery-delivery service
Instacart Inc.
The imbalance applied to postings for high-skill jobs as well,
the study found. Facebook's algorithms were more likely to show a
woman an ad for a technical job at Netflix Inc. -- which has a
relatively high level of female employment for the tech industry --
than an ad for a job at Nvidia Corp., a graphics-chip maker with a
higher proportion of male employees, based on data from federal
employment reports.
The results suggest "a platform whose algorithm learns and
perpetuates the existing difference in employee demographics," the
paper says, noting that Facebook's algorithms appeared to produce
skewed outcomes even if an employer intended to reach a
demographically balanced audience.
Federal law prohibits discrimination based on gender, race, age
and other traits in advertising for housing, employment and credit
products. While the law's application to behavioral advertising
remains contentious, the federal government has argued that ads
must be distributed in ways that don't disadvantage protected
classes of people's ability to see them.
The paper reflects Facebook's difficulties in understanding and
managing the societal effects of its content-recommendation
systems. Several large tech companies have teams working to study
and find ways to eliminate bias in their algorithms.
"Our system takes into account many signals to try and serve
people ads they will be most interested in, but we understand the
concerns raised in the report," said Beth Gautier, a spokeswoman
for Facebook. "We've taken meaningful steps to address issues of
discrimination in ads and have teams working on ads' fairness
today."
The USC researchers also ran near-identical tests of LinkedIn's
delivery of job ads but found no evidence of gender skewing on the
Microsoft Corp.-owned platform. The researchers didn't study other
websites that show job listings and said running tests on more
categories would improve confidence in the results.
Aleksandra Korolova, a former Google research scientist and one
of the study's authors, said studying Facebook's systems was
difficult without having access to company data but that she was
surprised the company hadn't addressed the skewed distribution of
job ads. "They've known about this for years, and it's an important
question for society," she said.
LinkedIn Vice President of Engineering Ashvin Kannan said the
USC paper's conclusions reflected LinkedIn's own findings, but the
company remains concerned about bias in its systems.
Questions of discriminatory and illegal ad targeting have loomed
large for Facebook for years. A 2016 report by ProPublica found
that the company allowed employers to exclude older workers from
seeing job postings and landlords to exclude ethnic minorities from
ads.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sued
Facebook in 2019 over what it called biased ad targeting, alleging
that the company was allowing landlords to exclude users with
interests in topics such as Hispanic culture, mobility scooters and
hijabs from apartment listings. Facebook settled the lawsuit and
said it has removed such categories as targeting options and
pledged to work with HUD to address the agency's other
concerns.
It has also settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil
Liberties Union, agreeing to take steps including studying possible
discriminatory outcomes produced by its algorithm.
While the research spotlights issues at Facebook, a lasting fix
for the problem has so far eluded the industry, said Piotr
Sapiezynski, a computer-science professor at Northeastern
University who collaborated with the USC team on past research into
racial disparities in the delivery of job ads.
"Until we figure out how to do this right, the short-term
solution is to turn off relevance matching for housing, credit and
employment ads," he said.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 09, 2021 08:14 ET (12:14 GMT)
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