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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.
"Facebook Rejects Female Engineers' Code More Often Than Male Counterparts, Analysis Finds"
Maybe it's just not as good, unless every female programmer signs it with "Coded by a Female Programmer!" That, and the little hearts above every lower-case "i".
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If Facebook started hiring lots of women just for the sake of having more women in the workforce (to meet some gender diversity quota) rather than based on the individual's skills, then it's likely that the average talent of the women in Facebook would be lower than their male counterparts. Taking this further, it seems likely to me that these women would also have their code rejected more often.
Even worse, the women who weren't quota hires will never be sure if they earned their spot with their vagina or not.
See that "Preview" button?
Trying to balance the fact that their vagina doesn't/shouldn't matter while simultaneously trying to control the world with it.
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! --
Bias and discrimination exist.
What also exists is people who do shitty work.
Unfortunately, in the world of the feminist SJW, only white males are capable of doing shitty work. In the alternate universe of the feminist SJW, women and minorities are incapable of doing shitty work, and to claim any differently makes you a racist, sexist misogynist pig .
https://pmd.github.io/
Use an automated code review to baseline. Compilers care nothing about genitalia.
I can say confidently that everyone is terrible.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Facebook has a manadate to hire more Female Engineers. As far fewer Female Engineers graduate than other Engineers one way to get the Quantity desired is to lower the Quality. Once you are letting in lesser Quality Engineers and then vetting their checkins at the existing standards its expected that more of the checkins will be rejected.
I just hope code review standards are not lowered in order to avoid emotional trauma.
What's next? 50% of surgeries have to be done by female surgeons?
The President needs to be Female 50% of the time?
50% of combat casualties need to be female?
**Life is too short to be serious**
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
Actually, if statistically women average less at lifting (they do), it exactly means that the average woman lifts less than the average man. That is a true fact (there only used to be true facts before the big fat oompa loompa took the office).
It's a good thing you posted as AC.
Only I can judge you.
I have zero problem accepting that possibility.
However, I find it absurd that some people have trouble accepting the possibility that inasmuch as women do approach things differently than males do in the general case, that this might very well affect the solutions they come up with, again, in the general case.
The first sign that political correctness has gone too far is when you see adherents ignoring facts right in front of their nose.
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.
But to assume that the sexes produce identical results when presented with identical problems... that actually seems more suspect to me than any claim of inherent equality.
Best tech support person ever worked for me - over thirty years - was female. By far. Because she, naturally I believe, brought compassion to the phone and she knew what she was doing right down to the last nut and bolt.
Equality of opportunity is a wonderful idea, and I'm all for it. And for reaping the results of the best outcome.
But presuming equality of capability because tits vs. danglies... that's just stupid. No one should do that. And you know what that is? It's bias.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
with "Angry feminist/SJW" replaced by "frat bros".
Except that because we're humans, it doesn't work that way. However, I would think that the bias would go in the other direction if there is one. That is, some male nerd (horny by definition) would be more likely to look more favorably than justified on a female's code because there is always the hope of a liaison at some point in the future.
Only I can judge you.
This study could be used as proof that Facebook is discriminating against male programmers by hiring female programmers with worse coding skills just to meet some "diversity" goals.
**Life is too short to be serious**
I have worked in IT for many years and have known some truly stellar female programmers - but I've never worked anywhere with 33% women.
Based purely on industry statistics they had to bypass more experienced males in order to hire that ratio of females. There are just so many more males in the industry than females.
Well, that's ambiguous English for you. "Average man" in informal speech usually means the mode, not the mean. It is possible with lopsided distributions. Of course, for the actual case at hand, mean median and mode are all higher for men.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
. . . the claim was "Maybe it's just not as good." Needs proof as you and parent said.
A sentence that begins with "maybe" is not a "claim".
Code review isn't supposed to be about rejecting code, it's supposed to be about improving code and providing another set of eyes with a different perspective. In several years doing code reviews for men and women, and having my code reviewed by men and women (for >1000 overall), I can count on maybe two hands the number of changes that I'd count as rejected - either because the change was unneeded and I was misunderstanding, or because it was needed but I wasn't the person to do it because I wasn't experienced enough with the code I was changing. Many changes go through substantial rework, though as you gain experience you can write better code that needs fewer fixes - so if on average females are more junior (which is true across a wide range of industries and largely responsible for the gender pay gap) then they will on average face greater rework - though on an individual basis they will face less and less as they become more experienced just like everyone else.
But thinking of - or practicing - code review as adversarial or something where changes can be "rejected" (other than for mundane reasons like trying to change another team's code in ways that don't fit their model of how their code works) is an antipattern. The most senior people, people who literally have invented entire disciplines, still have their code reviewed and change it in response to feedback. My tech lead likes to say that "confusion is a signal" - if your code is so brilliant or clever that it leaves a brand new engineer going "wha?" then it means you have to fix it, regardless of how senior you are, since the code should be understandable by the average employee. And when I review code I don't expect to pass down edicts, and probably 10-15% of my comments receive pushback from the author. It has to be a real problem for me to actually refuse to accept a change - maybe that's happened twice for reasons of code quality and not the mundane stuff I mentioned earlier like "I planned to rewrite how that test worked anyway, let's hold off on this hacky fix since I'll fix it properly". I prefer to chat informally with the author (and, and as an author, vice-versa) to come to something mutually agreeable, which lets me understand their concerns and vice-versa - and we both learn something.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Or facebook doesn't get enough qualified women applying and thus hires less qualified women for programming jobs because they don't like the gender imbalance.
This results in the average quality of female engineers being lower - resulting in both women not rising in the ranks and in lower quality patches.
That's probably already the case. Most environments, at best, you see a username at the beginning of a change request but unless I have to hunt down the "blame" for a line of code across several different repo technologies (things that went from CVS to Mercurial to Git), it never matters WHO wrote the code.
And whether jsmith is John or Jane is the least of my worries and doesn't even come into play in large organizations.
Gender has nothing to do with this, this is just fitting a story to fit the data. Rejections have to do with quality of code and in most companies, quality is directly related to your chances at promotions. If you don't write quality code, you don't get promoted to senior levels, being promoted to a senior programmer doesn't make you a better programmer.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
No, the claim is gender bias, the comment you responded to merely suggests a possibility that the article didn't bother to consider.
I was going with a proper definition, being that this site is aimed at non-idiots I figured that proper use of technical terms would be assumed.
See here for definition:
http://www.purplemath.com/modu...
This:
Mean, median, and mode are three kinds of "averages". There are many "averages" in statistics, but these are, I think, the three most common, and are certainly the three you are most likely to encounter in your pre-statistics courses, if the topic comes up at all.
The "mean" is the "average" you're used to, where you add up all the numbers and then divide by the number of numbers. The "median" is the "middle" value in the list of numbers. To find the median, your numbers have to be listed in numerical order from smallest to largest, so you may have to rewrite your list before you can find the median. The "mode" is the value that occurs most often. If no number in the list is repeated, then there is no mode for the list.
Only I can judge you.
What kind of code review system rejects code?
The purpose of a peer-review system for code isn't to exclude bad code, it's to fix it so that it's good code before it goes in. Maybe when they say "rejects" they mean "receives comments requesting adjustments"? If that's what they're measuring, then I'm still confused. In my experience, assuming you're doing reasonably-thorough reviews, almost every non-trivial change gets some comments, and has to be updated a bit before it can be merged.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I was going with a proper definition, being that this site is aimed at non-idiots I figured that proper use of technical terms would be assumed.
You must have mis-typed that URL. Sounds like you were going someplace interesting.
But specifically the term "average man" is confusing, as it's an idiom meaning "most representative" in normal speech.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I know it's not quite coding however it is interesting to apply.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Yeah, that was a simplistic site but these are simplistic terms.
Again, at a nerd-focused site, I took it for granted that "average man" implied the proper definition of "average" as used in statistics. Normal speech here is anything but normal, it is/can/should be more technical. Even for the trivial stuff.
Only I can judge you.
This seemed to suggest that a female engineer's work was more heavily scrutinized...
... suggested that the code rejections were due to engineering rank, not gender...
... speculate that Parikh's findings mean female engineers might not be rising in the ranks as fast...
... or perhaps that female engineers are leaving the company more often before being promoted.
This author seems to be a moron. I suggest that Facebook hires an independent investigator, if this is truly a thorn in their side worth removing. (It's probably not). I wish "news" outlets such as The Verge would not be so quick to speculate...perhaps they're just pushing their biased point of view with no consideration for anything else?
The odds are that Facebook's men are working longer hours and taking less time off than their female coworkers. Even in the same position with the same experience and credentials, the person who spent more time on a task is more likely to put out code which will pass review on the first try.
These are the same, completely explainable and rational reasons we have the gender earnings gap. (Note: I did not say "wage gap")
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The problem is compound by how free speech is quite dead. Say what you just said openly in a workplace of a semi-famous company. You will get fired faster than you can finish your sentence.
And yeah, it's basically impossible to control for all factors here. It could be a genuine gender difference (after all, people keep trying to drill in our head that things need to be done differently to attract female engineers, so they have to be different somehow), and it's not even necessarily negative either. It could be that men are more likely to just bypass the peer review process altogether. Or that women are more receptive to feedback. It could be that the schooling level is not the same at hire (after all, one of the big tenets of diversity hiring is to hire through different channels, including bootcamps, more, which would lead to different ratios). And it COULD be sexism. But it's simply too hard to figure out like this.
However, I could just post a "My guts feeling tells me females are getting screwed at company XYZ" and it would be headline news worthy and taken as truth.
I was recently reading an article that said "Women feel they are being passed up for promotion more often than men". While I'm pretty sure it IS true that they get screwed on promotions, what kind of stupid metric is that? EVERYONE feel they get screwed on promotions, ESPECIALLY people who don't deserve promotions. Wash, rince, repeat with every possible topic.
Stop including name, rank, and sex as part of the code or review process. Just review the end product based on efficiency. I worked at a large institution and they hired a far greater % of the female applicants than the males, but still ended up with an environment dominated by younger males. You cant hire those that don't apply.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
All the evidence indicates that its actually down to the relative quality of their work, yet here we are somehow still "speculating" that it actually _must_ be gender bias.
Women do not graduate with STEM degrees at the same rate as men. That you can find a single exception while ignoring the national statistics shows your own bias. Conversely, 61% of all medical doctors graduating are female. I could, like you did, point to a single school which graduates more men than women. That would not make the national numbers wrong, it would make me a fool for believing an exception makes it normal.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
As expected, a lot of people here being all "maybe it's something else". I'd love to see an anonymized dataset online for folks to rate publicly, and see how the results fall out.
Women are generally less confrontation and can defuse a situation with out it seeming to become a pissing contest. I can attest to this from personal experience. In a few situations some good 'ol boys just won't accept any authority from a women but that is rare. For many years the best criteria for becoming a police officer was to be big and intimidating, now education and common sense are high on that list. My only objection to hiring women as cops and fire people rests on the fact of being physically able to perform the life saving duties, can you carry the 110 lb. dummy from the burning car or can you physically open the fire hydrant, everything else is a matter of temperament and training.
Note I was in a previous life, long ago a Sheriff's deputy, and I was partnered with both men and women. Only in the county jail did I see women perform poorer and that wasn't because of what they did, but because of the mental retards that populate our county jails.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The reverse most definitely would be news, but would have a very different spin. "Female programmers write better code!" Would be the headline, they'd never attribute it to bias. In fact, the article would likely imply that it was despite bias instead of because of it.
Facebook discriminates in their hiring practices, and this is the result. We've had it drilled in to us for years that discrimination harms your company, and yet given the choice, all big companies rush to discriminate in their hiring practices to try to meet arbitrary quotas for various groups. The result is no surprise.
If you want the best employees, stop discriminating. And no, you can't do that by discriminating further. And yes, discriminating against straight white males is still discriminating.
If you hire based on race, religion, gender, age, or any other variables unrelated to the quality of the work the applicant can do, you guarantee that you do not get the best employees. This is not a surprise.
Just because you're discriminating in socially acceptable ways doesn't stop it from being discrimination, and the quality of your employees will reflect that.
Every time you hear a story like this about men mistreating or under-valuing women in the workplace, ask the same women how the *women* they work with treat them, compared to the men. You may be surprised to learn that women often mistreat women coworkers even worse than men do, in a great many circumstances. This doesn't justify men mistreating women, but it does mean that men mistreating women is far from the whole picture.
If Facebook applies lower standards when hiring female engineers in order to get more of them, then this would entirely explain things. It would simply mean that code by female engineers gets rejected more often on average, because at Facebook code from female engineers would on average be lower in quality. This would mean nothing for the quality of female engineers in general, only that they are rarer, which everybody already knew.
Note: Affirmative action of this type is not a good thing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Discrimination in non-skill-oriented ways when hiring is always bad. In the worst case it will lead to the minorities that get preferred being even lower in competence, because they know early on that they do not need to work as hard. Hence this type of discrimination may well be counterproductive. A case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions (and lack of insight).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The trouble here is that the study hasn't controlled for the _quality_ of code written, and the knock-on consequences. If, for some reason, the female part of the workforce that facebook has happens to be producing lower quality code compared to the average (and _why_ this is the case then needs to be looked into, not simply put down to gender), then naturally the knock-on effect of that is, assuming rejection of code is fair, both women rising more slowly through software engineering ranks (assuming the ranks are done solely on merit), and also women's code being rejected more. Each of these possibilities leads to more questions, and the trouble is that you have an awkward choice of either publishing a study where significant factors haven't even been identified, let alone controlled for, or else trying to do it properly, and either coming up with something inclusive, non-headline-grabbing, and basically forgettable, or else failing to produce something to publish at all. This is one problem that plagues much of the modern world.
I do think there is still a significant gender bias against women, but this kind of 'study' does little other than wave the flag for that. When the contribution of variables you haven't controlled for dwarfs the trend your analysis has picked out, and these 'not controlled for' variables are not statistically independent of your experimental variables, then for all practical purposes, whatever 'signal' you have picked up, is basically swamped by noise. Only when the 'can be explained by noise' explanation can be eliminated can you really confidently claim a result.
So I can believe there is a bias against women, but this sort of study is not going to convince me of anything.
John_Chalisque
We were hiring a new engineer. A senior manager comes in all excited, my boss and I are sitting next to each other:
Senior: So tell me about this _____ applicant. Because she ticks most of the right boxes.
[she was asian and female]
My Boss: Oh did we mention she was a lesbian?
Senior: Really? [in a super excited voice]
Me and by boss dumbfounded: No, and if she were we wouldn't ask. We'll let you know who gets through to the next round on merit.
She was good, but it wasn't the right job for her unfortunately.
(...) with women holding just 17 percent of technical roles (...)
That percentage of women is well above what I'm used to encountering. It apparently is on par with the number of female CS students in the US (17%) but the number of female software engineers is much lower (12%). Therefore, they can probably only achieve a 17% female technical workforce if they're hiring less qualified women; there simply aren't enough of them.
Also, in my experience (which may not be representative), women in CS tend to be promoted to non-technical jobs (managers, sales) more often than their male counterparts or choose to go do something completely different after several years, making the average female software engineer younger (and thus less experienced) than their male counterparts. Given these numbers, a higher percentage of rejected code is exactly what I'd expect.
The question is not why their code is rejected; the question that really matters is what it is that makes women leave their jobs. If it's just what they want, that's great. If they're somehow scared away, we should look into that.
0x or or snor perron?!
. . . the claim was "Maybe it's just not as good." Needs proof as you and parent said.
A sentence that begins with "maybe" is not a "claim".
What about one that starts with "I have faith that..." or "I find your lack of faith in this code disturbing"?
We'll make great pets
It could also be Facebook's diversity hiring policies mean that they hire for diversity over skill.
I have. My first development job 20 years ago was at about that level. The software development group I'm in now, as fate would have it, has 10 members, 3 of which identify female (30%).
We know plenty of differences, but dipshit SJWs refuse to look at science and claim anyone who does must be a racist/misogynist/homophobe/xenophobe. Mens muscles develop quite differently than women, because _TESTOSTERONE_. Women who take _TESTOSTERONE_ (which is naturally produced in high quantities by males) can become stronger than other women, but still not as strong as a man.
Now I'm going to guess that you are going to head off into 3rd hand bullshit speculation about an abnormality claiming it's the "normal", so don't.
We also know that the minds of men and women differ, because BIOLOGY. We have had hundreds of thousands of years of evolution where women had to be nurturing and raise kids or the tribe/city/country would die due to invasion by another tribe's _TESTOSTERONE_ filled males. As with ignoring biology I'm sure you will take the SJW path and claim an anomaly in history should be treated as the norm.
We have the science, and instead of claiming "bigotry" you should actually study it.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
so... what you're saying is the burden of proof is on the disputing party? I don't think that's how it works.
can we all unanimously agree that poor or nonperformant code is the single most common reason why it would be rejected? with that in mind, any time someone says code is rejected, the foremost and most likely reasoning should be that the code is shit.
if someone comes along and suggest that a new and disparate causal link exists, it is their job to provide evidence, not our job to prove that causal links we all already agree on exist.
Just women trying to disprove some ancient prejudice about women sucking at math and science. You just continue to fail at trying to reprogram society to turn girls into boy clones. I have no idea if there's fundamentally any difference between us that makes one sex better at technical work than another. But I'm just not interesting in your political crusade to prove your point anymore. It just doesn't matter to me. Please stop trying to blame the whole fucking thing on men. Women utterly dominate the industry of raising children, and they still haven't managed to reprogram girls....I--as a man--am not causing this.
Correlation does not equal causation https://medium.freecodecamp.co...
And now they want a solution, where female code should be accepted despite bugs?
Hey, every issue found is a good thing. It should be fixed and then the code should be resubmitted.
It may even mean code of higher quality, when bugs are easier to find. In unreadable code bugs may be hard to spot, while good code makes bugs more obvious. While the programmer itself may have some blindness there (because he wrote the code and reads his idea, not the code when reviewing himself), a peer review works better with readable code. Some people even tend to accept unreadable code to avoid telling, that they do not understand this "work of a genius".
Facebook pushed to hire more females to make diversity quotas.
Hires loads of females, which in turn makes the average female wage, position, and skill level drop.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
My personal experience is limited, but I've found that my female colleagues to be much like my male ones. When I was working with very good people, the women were as good as the men. When I was working in dysfunctional shops, the women there were still as good as the men there, but it was a much lower bar. I haven't seen one of your As in decades.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes