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

Re: Maybe

[ghoul]

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.