Facebook Rejects Female Engineers' Code More Often Than Male Counterparts, Analysis Finds (theverge.com)

According to The Wall Street Journal, female engineers who work at Facebook may face gender bias that prevents their code from being accepted at the same rate as male counterparts. "For Facebook, these revelations call into question the company's ongoing diversity efforts and its goal to build overarching online systems for people around the globe," reports The Verge. "The company's workforce is just 33 percent female, with women holding just 17 percent of technical roles and 27 percent of leadership positions." From the report: The findings come in two parts. An initial study by a former employee found that code written by female engineers was less likely to make it through Facebook's internal peer review system. This seemed to suggest that a female engineer's work was more heavily scrutinized. Facebook, alarmed by this data, commissioned a second study by Jay Parikh, its head of infrastructure, to investigate any potential issues. Parikh's findings suggested that the code rejections were due to engineering rank, not gender. However, Facebook employees now speculate that Parikh's findings mean female engineers might not be rising in the ranks as fast as male counterparts who joined the company at the same time, or perhaps that female engineers are leaving the company more often before being promoted. Either possibility could result in the 35 percent higher code rejection rate for female engineers. When contacted by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook called the initial study "incomplete and inaccurate" and based on "incomplete data," but did not shy away from confirming Parikh's separate findings.

Comments

Feminist bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in an engineering office.

I would place female engineers' personality types into one of three categories:

A. Angry feminist/SJW type. While these types of women may be very capable/competent - they tend to be extremely combative and turn anything and everything into a gender issue. More likely to cite "statistics" such as the OP's article and insist on hiring quotas.
B. "Fell into it" type. Somewhat/less capable. Generally very likeable and easy to work with, tend to fall more on the attractive side of looks. They "fell into" the business and aren't the geeky type at all. Leave at 5PM on the dot, they do "just enough" to get the job done. Because they have a social life & indeed would make a better project manager than coder. Probably wrote the code that OP mentioned.
C. Quiet/conservative type. Tend to be the smartest & most capable. Very easy to work with. Unfortunately I would place less than 5% of female engineers in this category.

Re:As a programmer with decades of experience

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true - few people today under 40 can code well, or even understand what the compiler is doing. I have seen many try to fake this knowledge and they get exposed quickly. Then I educate them and train them until they understand why it's important.

Re: Maybe

[AmiMoJo]

>Why is a society's priority to get more women into tech?

Girls tell us they are interested but face barriers that boys don't. Some of us want to help them.