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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
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.
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.
. . . 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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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 ?
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.
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.