Facebook campaigns, slammed for being sexist

A recent BBC article reported that Facebook has been accused of rolling sexist job advertising.

Investigative campaigners, Global Witness, have brought a startling bias to light, claiming that Facebook’s advertising strategy has a considerably sexist approach. The organization had created 4 test adverts to put Facebook under scrutiny, which lead to uncovering a huge discriminatory gender bias.

The ads that ran were for 4 job advertisements, linking to genuine vacancies posted by recruitment company indeed.com. The roles were for nursery nurses, pilots, mechanics and psychologists. It’s critical to note that Global Witness did not manually enter any targeting strategy, it was left entirely to Facebook who use an automated algorithm that shows your ads to ‘who is most likely to click on them’. When creating your advertisement via Facebook, they require advertisers to confirm that they ‘will not discriminate when posting job ads’ however ‘it’s own ad delivery system appears to operate in a discriminatory manner’. (Global Witness)

And here are the findings to prove it:

• 96% of the people shown the ad for mechanic jobs were men;

• 95% of those shown the ad for nursery nurse jobs were women;

• 75% of those shown the ad for pilot jobs were men;

• 77% of those shown the ad for psychologist jobs were women

(Data collected directly from