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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.
The problem for many authors, not just coders, is that both women and men rank them more harshly.
No matter how you slice it.
I used to experiment with this by swapping names on code submissions with female colleagues and watching code suddenly be treated differently.
The cutting critiques were the worst parts.
Is it fair?
No.
Does it happen?
Yes.
My advice is find some token replacement method for code submissions so that evaluators can't extrapolate gender.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
https://pmd.github.io/
Use an automated code review to baseline. Compilers care nothing about genitalia.
Maybe they were hired for their looks not their leet coding skills. Not like that would EVER happen.
This. Exactly this. Posting as AC for obvious reasons. I've worked in the Bay Area for over 12 years for different companies, and I've seen it many times. Mediocre female engineers (software, electrical or network) get hired based on diversity quotas and in many cases their looks as well. Managers find out after about a year or so that their hires weren't such a good fit to the team as they hoped, and they end up promoting the mediocre engineers to poor managers. Now the good engineers report to the mediocre ones and get frustrated, and eventually leave the company. And of course, the /. feminazi crew will downmod this, but the truth has to be said.
/. or CNN of course.
I also need to add that I have seen many, many good female engineers. It's just that the ones that get hired based on their looks or for other reasons than their engineering qualities are usually not a good fit for the company. The good ones are often very much appreciated, and I've seen many occasions where they are paid the most of the entire team. But you never hear that on
For all I know, the women's solutions are better because of this, and the stats brought to light here are because men can't see that - because the thinking isn't the same.
Real life example of this happening: Female police officers.
For many years the most important criteria for evaluating a police officer was "number of arrests". Women just didn't measure up, and performed poorly.
Then "community policing" was adopted, and people realized that "making arrests" was actually a dumb way to measure police performance. Far more important was preventing the crimes from happening in the first place, and defusing potentially violent situations rather than escalating them. By these measures, women are, on average, better police officers than men.
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.
Nope. As someone who coaches a programming/robotics program at an elementary school for 4th, 5th and 6th graders, I can say that it is very difficult to get girls interested even in elementary school. The few that participate are mostly there because their parents forced them.
I have tried hard to get more girls to sign up. I recruited a techno-mom to be an assistant coach and role model. We let them form an all-girl team (which they prefer). We tried cooperation oriented programming tasks, rather than competitions. We tried other girl-oriented stuff like 3D-printing dollhouse furniture. None of that made a difference. Half of them quit when there was a time conflict with the school play rehearsals. Zero boys have dropped out.
I feel very frustrated. If anyone has any ideas on how to get girls interested in tech, I would love to hear about it.
It would be interesting to study the patterns of the differences. There could indeed be a "style mismatch" between the way females tend to code versus males. Everyone has their personal preferences and as a reviewer, if a specimen doesn't match close enough to their preferences, they are more likely to reject it.
Anyhow, the devil's in the details, and we don't have those. Factors to be checked include things like duration at the company, education level, age, total coding experience, familiarity between the inspector and inspectee (including does inspector know the gender), reason(s) for the rejection, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
A few years ago my nieces were really interested in this: http://web.stanford.edu/class/...
We did the image exercises. I started off doing most of the typing with their input, then they did some on their own. The cool thing with this library is you can go way off on a tangent. We made stripes of across some of the images for instance.
For what it's worth, my wife participated in an outreach program through her work to expose kids to programming. They sent a team to a school and each employee took a group of kids and did a different project. I suggested this one, which my wife customized a bit. It was by far the most popular project with the kids (I think they were 6th and 7th graders). Graphics are cool, especially the green-screen exercises.
I'm can't help you, but I'm just as frustrated.
My 12 years old niece loves, loves, Kerbal Space Program and plays it constantly. I introduced it to her when it first came out in 2015, when she was 10, and she's been having fun launching rockets, failing, redesigning, and trying again - she loves it. But she is absolutely terrified of her friends finding out, so much so that she'll play dumb about the game whenever her friends are around and a family member happens to mention it. I can't stress enough how scared she is for her friends to find out she likes a game about rocket science.
When I ask her why she says, pretty plainly, "Girls aren't supposed to be smart, no one likes smart girls - please don't tell anyone I like this game, I don't want people thinking I'm smart because then I won't have any friends!" She's 12! She's deliberately going out of her way to hinder herself and limit her choices in life because society has browbeat into her that she's not supposed to be smart or take an interest in science. The Ontario Science Centre is one of her favourite places to go, she begs me to take her whenever I can - and she totally gets the science, especially the Astronomy section, and could even be a scientist someday if she really wanted to - but she never tells her friends that she loves going there lest they think she's "smart" and shun her.
I've been trying to convince her otherwise, but it just doesn't work - peer pressure when you're a child is a horrific thing, it really messes you up - she's been telling me that girls aren't supposed to be smart for years now - and I think as adults many of us forget just how important social acceptance is to kids - how important it was to us when we were kids - and how that shapes one's perceptions far into the future.