Trucking news and briefs for Thursday, Dec. 8, 2022:
The Real Women in Trucking group has accused Facebook of discriminating against women when serving up employment ads for trucking and other companies and now seeks "any and all remedies" in response. That's according to a complaint filed by the group with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The complaint's text notes it comes on "behalf of millions of women and older people who have been denied equal employment opportunity because Meta Platforms," formerly Facebook, "discriminates based on gender and age when distributing job advertisements to job seekers on Facebook’s social media platform."
RWIT goes on to note legal precedent establishing that it's illegal to "steer job ads away from people" based on "race, gender, age, and other protected statuses," alleging that Facebook's own data shows its targeting system "routinely discriminates based on gender and age when it decides which individuals receive those ads"
In the most extreme of examples across a variety of industries, including trucking, even when companies directed Facebook to target ads across the user base regardless of gender/age, Facebook's algorithm "delivered the ads to Facebook users who are over 99% male and 99% younger than 55 years old," while job-seeking Facebook users in general are in fact 54% female, and 28% are over 54 years old, the complaint notes, citing Facebook data. RWIT seeks "injunctive relief," said RWIT leader Desiree Wood, and, "if applicable, monetary relief for anyone harmed."
The broader trucking industry's truck drivers are more often men than women, with estimates of the percentage of female drivers ranging between 6%-7% to more than 10%.
“Addressing fairness in ads is an industry-wide challenge and we’ve been collaborating with civil rights groups, academics and regulators to advance fairness in our ads system," a Facebook spokesperson said via an emailed statement. "We’re actively building technology designed to make additional progress in this area."
