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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.

4 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Maybe by ghoul · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just because their are fewer of a particular gender in an institution does not automatically translate to Gender Bias. There could be many reasons. After all noone ever accuses maternity wards of discriminating against men even though 100% of their clientele are female.
    Females mature much faster than males. By the time they get introduced to tech in schools nowadays they are already entering puberty and distracted by hormones. The key to get more women into tech is start introducing programming in elementary school and hook them on coding before they get sidetracked with stupid tween shit.
    Though one must ask the question - "Why is a society's priority to get more women into tech?" We dont see articles on how to get more men into nursing, teaching or rhythmic Gymnastics. People choose what interests them and social biases play a part in what interests them but unless someone is actually getting harmed by the choice why should Society spend resources balancing the trend? After all not all trends will ever be balanced.

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  2. Re:Maybe by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Informative

    Maybe it's just not as good

    Back when having women in orchestras was rare, there was a similar belief as to why they weren't given jobs after auditioning. "Maybe they're just not as good as their male counterparts." or, "Women probably just don't have the strength to (blow a trumpet, hold a cello, play percussion)". You would hear, "It takes a lot of stamina and commitment to be a great musician, and women just don't have it."

    That was the prevalent belief in the professional music world until orchestras started holding blind auditions. Now women make up more than 50% of professional orchestras.

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  3. Re:Bias, eh? by Mashiki · · Score: 3, Informative

    [citation needed]

    This is pretty well known for anyone who's been in training, or knows someone who was a cop prior to say 1980. Used to be performance was weighted based on the number of arrests/investigations/etc. Community Oriented Policing(COP) changed all that in say 1982-84ish when a lot of police forces went to police services. Policing in the US is still holds a military structure, and works in a pyramid type fashion, the guy at the top is the most important and the way a police force works and solves problems is dictated through the chain of command. Nearly all policing in the west(inc. Japan) however now works on an inverse pyramid. Meaning the guy at the bottom has wide leeway to determine the right way to deal with a problem and "how" that problem should be solved. COP changed the way policing was done from that metric to "how" a problem was solved based on what the individual did to solve it. There are still some parts of policing that are weighted on tickets/arrests/etc. Traffic police in many places performance is weighted on tickets for example, but even that's falling to the wayside.

    The US in and of itself is still probably ~10-15 years out from the shift to a full-on COP style of policing. It's a better system by far and is much more like the early days(1880-1950) of policing where you have people who work the same areas day-in and day out, know the people, live in the same area, hiring is based on people who live there, etc. The 1950-1980ish era pushed the "roving police" idea, where the idea of driving around and never talking with people was a great(really terrible) idea.

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  4. Re:Its because of the diversity efforts by Mashiki · · Score: 3, Informative

    Nursing is a low paying job? You must live in a shit country. The average nurse makes $33/hr here in Canada. The only other job I can think of here where I could make that is where I'm risking my life in the oil patch, in a mine. Or have 20+ years experience in IT, or am in a specialized field.

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