Popular networking website LinkedIn has been accused of sexism after they uploaded advertisements that featured men and ignored the ones that featured women, My Fox Austin reports.
Toptal, the network developer that submitted the advertisements, claims LinkedIn only uploaded the ads that featured men because they believe that the women in the photos were too attractive to be web engineers.
"Today was a disappointing day at Toptal," said Toptal CEO, Taso Du Val, on the company blog. "We saw extreme sexism within the tech community, from an industry leader and advertising partner that we work with quite extensively: LinkedIn."
In the post, Du Val goes on to recount the sequence of events relating to the company's ads on LinkedIn, which began a month ago, when the ads were mysteriously disabled and a customer service representative told him that "we had to reject the ads on the Toptal business ads account as many LinkedIn members complained about the women in images you were using."
Du Val said that while some of the ads included stock photos, one of them featured actual employee Florenica Antara of Buenos Aires.
In a phone call with The Huffington Post, Antara said she was saddened by LinkedIn's intial decision and "never felt anything like this before in IT, or in any work department."
Antara said women have the same rights as anybody else to be eligible for web development jobs, including the right to "a nice picture."
In response to the criticism, LinkedIn said the ads that were not included as a result of an error with its customer service team and agreed to run the ad.
"You should know that while our Customer Service was going through a standard process of reviewing LinkedIn Ads, TopTal's ads were rejected in error," LinkedIn explained to Yahoo! Shine in an email, "We've since taken the necessary measures to approve the previously rejected ads, and TopTal can now run them on our platform as intended."
