
Facebook's female engineers claim gender bias - forgingahead
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-female-engineers-claim-gender-bias-1493737116
======
bl4ckm0r3
As an engineer working in silicon valley, I have definitely seen a lower bar
for female engineers interviews because companies are trying to catch up on
the gender divide in their company. You can land a job almost everywhere with
almost no knowledge if you are a jr female developer, which is not true for
men. It is also true that there is a bias in the industry, but I don't think
this approach is helping at all, if nothing people think women deserve it even
less... I believe men and women are equal in terms of capabilities and skills,
but giving away jobs to a minority (women in this case) isn't the right way to
make them gain the respect they deserve or block/control the bias against
them.

~~~
sporkenfang
As someone who has hired both males and females for junior and senior
engineering positions at several companies, what you are saying is not the
case.

The coding challenges and interviews are the same. The decisions of hiring
committees I have been on have been actually in general weighted toward white
men with experience more often than not, because many of the women I'm seeing
are just out of school or with a little experience (which says good things
about the future assuming they stick around).

However, I have seen race/gender used as the deciding factor between two
candidates who are in all other ways equally excellent and suited for the role
(that is, pick the candidate who is not a white male out of two whose skills
and resumes and interview performance are equal).

~~~
rmartelli
Yes, the coding challenges and interviews are the same. But they are graded
differently even before the packet is seen by the hiring committee.

I've talked to many interviewers at my company, and many people talk about how
they bump up the score of "diversity candidates" even though management says
that we don't lower the bar. This is talked about openly.

I've only seen this at a Bay Area company. Other companies I have worked at
have had a very strong stance against using race or gender as a basis of
making hiring decisions.

~~~
zigzigzag
It's also the case that the hiring pipelines can be biased in other ways. For
instance if a woman fails a phone screen she may be given a second phone
screen anyway, or even on-sites anyway, "just in case", whereas the man would
have been canned at the first stage. Was definitely told this was happening by
recruiters in the past.

~~~
sporkenfang
Interesting. We have done that for people of any gender in grad programs
before when hiring for targeted roles suited for their specialty, but not to
my knowledge for candidates by gender.

------
jaemison
Engadget summary: [https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/02/facebook-coding-
sexism-a...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/02/facebook-coding-sexism-
allegation/)

I don't work for Facebook so I can't speak to their particular culture
problems, but I am a female SDE working at one of the "big-5" and I deal with
this on a near-daily basis.

Examples include: \- having to chase down specific individuals and sit down
with them to walk them through my code review \- waiting for approvals on code
reviews while other engineers, not wanting to be blocked on my work, copy and
paste my code directly into their branches and open new code reviews which
have no problem getting approvals. \- getting approvals quickly only on work
that can't possibly break anything important (CSS! /s).

If anyone has any suggestions for how to get assigned more interesting tasks
that don't take weeks to get through code review, I'm all ears. Forgive me for
sounding ignorant, but rather than getting bogged down in statistics and
senior engineer distribution (because let's be serious - if women can't get
code reviews on important feature work, they weren't getting to senior
engineer anyway) let's take the raw data at face value and start with the
hypothesis that this is a real problem related to how men and women interact
when placed in a high-pressure team situation and focus on addressing that
problem first please.

~~~
Afforess
> _Examples include: - having to chase down specific individuals and sit down
> with them to walk them through my code review - waiting for approvals on
> code reviews while other engineers, not wanting to be blocked on my work,
> copy and paste my code directly into their branches and open new code
> reviews which have no problem getting approvals_

That's crazy! I'd be escalating that shit to my manager in the first day it
happened. Management should sort out any individuals that have a problem. I
can't understand why a company would hire an engineer _not_ to do work.

~~~
nojvek
I'm glad you raised this. You should definitely be vocal regarding this to
your manager and if he/she doesn't listen then raise to manager's manager.

This is unacceptable and definitely shouldn't be the norm.

------
tom-_-
Is it possible that the hiring standards for women at FB is lower than that of
their male counterparts, resulting in a larger number of issues with their
code? Maybe it's not bias in the code reviews that are leading to this gap but
rather bias in the hiring policy.

I don't work at FB, but it's possibility. I'd like to hear from those that do.

~~~
ng12
I once worked at a "hot" tech company that had a formal policy where HR had to
get involved before rejecting a borderline candidate if they were female. It
was a shame -- up until that point there were few female engineers but they
were all brilliant. After that policy was implemented you had to wonder which
were the token hires.

~~~
zigzigzag
The issue is not necessarily hiring. There was a story on HN a while back
saying how Facebook recruiters had stopped bothering to target women
specifically because even though they were heavily incentivised to do so, the
FB hiring committees weren't on board with the whole positive discrimination
thing so it wasn't working.

However, the big tech firms do seem to have a problem with firing. I've heard
this several times now from other people and saw it myself when I worked at
Google. Hiring is never 100% accurate and so even if hiring itself is unbiased
(questionable at best), without unbiased firing the quality of that segment of
the worker pool goes downwards over time. Even though the engineers often
truly believe in a meritocracy, HR in particular is a strongly female
dominated profession and unfortunately I do suspect a "sisters gotta stick
together" mentality because I saw within the span of a single year at Google a
man get canned for merely not being particularly productive, whilst a woman
who openly and repeatedly lied in meetings (and lied very badly at that), and
who caused her team huge heartache due to her terrible quality work, was not
only not fired but in the end promoted into management. It was widely known
that women who weren't very good or caused trouble were almost impossible to
get rid of and were typically transferred around between teams rather than
shown the door.

------
ryanwaggoner
I initially read this headline as "Facebook's female engineer claims gender
bias", which would make a funny Onion headline.

------
ng12
Smells like bad stats to me. Do women use the same technologies or work on the
same projects as the average male engineers? Do the CR stats reflect their
level/experience, and if so are they different from male engineers at the same
level? Does Facebook hire female engineers with the same background as males?
Seems like this is just narrative building.

~~~
itsdrewmiller
What about this smells like bad stats to you? Given that the answer to at
least one of your questions is in the article (or easily searchable online if
you don't have wsj access), it seems like maybe you are assuming it is bad
stats because you don't like the conclusion?

To me the engineer's study uses data that should be free from obvious bias
(duration at facebook) while the company study uses data that one might expect
to exhibit the same bias as that they are intending to study (promotion
decisions and code review decisions). While there are undoubtedly improvements
that could be done with more data or more time, I would be inclined to take
the results at face value rather than assuming something must be wrong.

~~~
ng12
No, I'm saying it's bad stats because it seems like bad stats -- and without
the dataset we can't verify. There's a lot going on here and even jumping to a
conclusion of sexism is kind of silly. Maybe women are more likely to prefer a
collaborative approach to problem solving and therefore are more likely to put
up a CR earlier in the process?

Why I wouldn't take it at face value: rejecting CRs sucks. Every round of
review takes time away from the reviewer as well as the reviewee. Unconscious
biases exist, sure, but it's hard to argue that people are actively making
their life more difficult because of them.

~~~
itsdrewmiller
Tautologies are neither arguments nor explanations - what about it seems like
bad stats to you?

I agree that there are many plausible explanations for why code from women
would be rejected at a higher rate at Facebook. I don't think that
demonstrates bad stats though. I don't think your collaboration suggestion is
very likely (given other public large scale analysis of male/female PR
acceptance rates that showed them to be roughly equal) but I don't think that
undermines your overall point.

I don't think it's material whether it is overt or subconscious bias leading
to these results - either one would be a big problem that Facebook should
recognize and work on.

~~~
ng12
What I mean when I say "bad stats" is that the article is drawing conclusions
based on a particular view of a data set which probably does not accurately
reflect reality for a laundry list of reasons.

As an example, I'm sure of you're heard of the 77-79 cent wage gap. I'd call
that bad stats -- what the study was actually comparing was the average income
of the entire male US population and the entire female population. When you
correct for job title the gap is actually closer to 95 cents on the dollar --
and you're still not correcting for other factors, such as the fact that men
work more hours than women and tend to be more aggressive negotiators. But
people read the study, took the data on face value, and now the wage gap is a
cultural meme we can't get rid of.

I think the same thing applies here -- a slice of the data looks funny so
people cry sexism. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the difference goes away
if you adjust for level, experience, technology used, product, background,
etc, etc, etc. Publishing stats like that is dangerous unless you also release
the data set and the method you used to derive your stats.

------
cynokit
What's got me confused is the % of men who seem to be surprised by this. It's
business as usual for women.

If you see a woman with a 5-10 year long engineerin career, please recognize
the determination it takes to make it that far.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
>please recognize the determination it takes to make it that far.

Why do you say this? Isn't it more likely that many women prefer to take on
the role of a mother, and if they've been in a high paid engineering position
they likely have a partner who can provide for both of them while they raise
children.

Slaving away at an engineering career doesn't seem all that appealing after
you've had the rewarding experience of raising your children.

~~~
rayiner
Raising kids is rewarding at a high level, but involves a lot of drudgery. I
don't want to knock those who enjoy that stuff, but at the same time I feel
like it's important for parents to know that you can love your kids while
acknowledging that the day-to-day of parenting is often a mind-numbing low-
level chore. The idea that it's intrinsically fulfilling for everyone or even
most people is one invented by society to placate women who were historically
excluded from the work force. _E.g._ My mom and my wife's mom both left
professional careers to raise kids, and both are quite bitter about it.

------
iplaw
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but it is a valid question.

If Facebook is attempting to meet diversity quotas, which certainly exist, by
pulling from a limited pool of qualifying candidates, in some scenarios, they
will necessarily need to employ lower qualified candidates.

I'm NOT NOT NOT saying that women in general cannot code, or produce lower
quality code, or anything of the like.

I AM saying that there are fewer female developers than male developers and,
assuming an equal distribution of skill level between the two groups, there
will necessarily be fewer highly qualified female coders than highly qualified
male coders.

Thus, if Facebook wants a 50:50 male-to-female ratio, they will necessarily
have fewer highly qualified female developers IF the number of positions to be
filled by females exceeds the number of highly qualified female applicants,
but the number of positions to be filled by males does not exceed the number
of highly qualified male candidates.

~~~
evgen
This only matters if the different skill distributions would make it likely
that a lesser-skilled candidate does not meet the standards needed to produce
good code at that level. In my experience this is not the case. When you are
hiring for one of the big-5, the candidates that make it through the first-
pass screening by the recruiters are usually people who any other company
would hire on the spot. When you get down to making a decision among the top
few from any crop of candidates it really is a coin flip.

Every engineer at Facebook likes to think that they are there because they are
'the best of the best', but having sat through far more hiring reviews at
Facebook than I ever thought I would have to put up, with the simple fact is
that for every person you see walking around the campus there were two or
three other people who the job offer could have just as easily gone to were it
not for a whole host of non-code/non-dev reasons; these reasons can range from
gender to the sloppy handwriting on the whiteboard to the fact that when I
came in to do your manager interview I happened to be a little annoyed that
the cafe had run out of lox for my morning bagel.

In my experience, the least qualified female engineers I encountered were more
qualified than the lower quartile of male engineers and they worked a hell of
a lot harder to boot.

~~~
ramblerman
> In my experience, the least qualified female engineers I encountered were
> more qualified than the lower quartile of male engineers and they worked a
> hell of a lot harder to boot.

lol, that's so ridiculously sexist, can you imagine making the opposite
statement in today's climate. To top it off it's based off your one anecdote,
I don't even know how to respond to this.

~~~
evgen
It is quite obviously an anecdote and not hard data (which the claim
referenced in the original article provided), but it is an anecdote based upon
direct observation rather than a whining response from someone with neither
observational data or empirical data.

------
afinlayson
Imagine if the fix for this is to remove the account identity from commits, so
you don't know if it's a man or a woman writing the code. Wouldn't that be
ironic for Facebook...

~~~
mahyarm
Most code review is not that anonymous. You often talk in person or similar
about code and your identity is going to come out. These engineering
organizations are the size of villages at most, it's hard to avoid.

------
Geekette
Given the presence of studies noting similar issues e.g. STEM faculty rating
male applicants as more competent and employable than identical female
ones[1], women’s performance reviews found more likely to include critical
feedback than those of their male peers[2], it is a plausible scenario that
female FB engineers receive 35% more rejections of their code than male ones.

[1]
[http://www.pnas.org/content/112/43/13201](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/43/13201)

[2] [http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-
bias...](http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias/)

------
thinkaboutit113
Throwaway for obvious reasons.

I too, am a female engineer at one of the well known companies in the Bay
Area.

As a background, I have a masters degree in CS and am in my 5th year of
working as an engineer.

Here's the problems that I faced:

1\. Not taking my opinions seriously - I experimented with this one! My
manager would endlessly argue over every small opinion I had but the same
opinion that my colleague would have, would get noticed and sometimes even
praised. Even on silly things. I can't get into project details but for a new
project, I suggested that we try out the desktop version of Git to make
transition from p4 easier. My manager was absolutely against it and asked me
to setup a p4 project for the same and make it work with p4. A coworker(10
years my senior) suggested we use the same desktop version of git and we
switched, no questions asked. I figured he changed his mind since both of us
said it. This happened 4 times before I once, actually told my opinion to my
colleague to convey to my manager and my manager complied with no questions
asked. This is how I get my opinions across now. I do understand that I don't
have 10 years of experience but I can be right sometimes. And no, the same did
not happen to the new guy on the team. I noticed it only when my male
colleague pointed it out to me and sympathized with me on being micromanaged.
2\. Growth - I cared less about growth as far as I had a decent salary to live
with. I am someone who likes to work for the challenges I can solve and not
for the minor salary increases or bonuses. May sound stupid but each person is
different. This was fine until I realized that I wasn't given more
responsibilities because they were given only to senior engineers. Being
promoted to different levels means a salary increase is a must(company rules).
I definitely wanted more responsibilities. Each year it was a different story
as to why I wasn't promoted and the hardest part? Being told that I work like
a senior engineer and if I do more work, I'll get the promotion next year. 3\.
Being classified as the 'diversity quota' \- I have as much qualifications as
much as the next guy, if not more. I work on side projects during the weekends
and am picking up machine learning out of interest on how to incorporate it in
my daily work. Being the only girl on the team, people wanting to hire me to
increase their diversity numbers but not plan on assigning me good work, being
treated as the female-employee-at-work to boost the company's image alone,
sucks. Imposter syndrome is real and these opinions contribute to it more.

I took up engineering to solve hard problems. It is sad that the culture of a
company/valley contributed to me contemplating want to quit engineering to do
something where I'll be treated right.

Not all problems women face have to be sexual harassment to get noticed, these
workplace biases are hard to navigate. This is especially to people who diss
diversity programs, there is the reason it's in place. I've received so much
help from women-focused diversity programs and have even helped fix a problem
or two along the way.

Finally, on a funny end note, I'm a big hacker news fan and have noticed how
passing constructive feedback that can sometimes come across as negative but
useful on a system/product/post is fairly common here. This post is hopefully
taken in the same manner and not a female-ranting-about-things comment.

~~~
Core0001
"Being told that I work like a senior engineer and if I do more work, I'll get
the promotion next year."

My f'ing God, This. A thousand times this.

10 years I've been working as a junior f'ing programmer doing senior (and
above) level work and roles. Every review is glowing. Every manager fights to
have me on their team. I jave engineers under me. I mentor all the new hires.
I am go to for all questions.

When it comes time for a promotion.. Suddenly I need to do more of something.
They can never define what that something is, but i can forget ever being
promoted.

I'm so close to saying screw it and quitting. Being talked over, interrupted,
not having my ideas taken seriously until a male parrots them, being
micromanaged, having my accompliahments dismissed while lesser accomplishments
by males are lauded.

If i didnt love this work so much, I wouldve quit 5 years ago. Being a woman
in tech sucks balls. I was a LCpl in the Marines and faced less sexism and
animosity than i have in the tech field.

I completely belive the findings by these women are real and accurate. Too
many other fields have proven the same scenarios exist.

~~~
pottersbasilisk
Im a male junior dev.I go through that too. Its not a gender thing,but a toxic
personality thing. The military teaches teamwork but tech is the opposite.
Just look at the hype about 10x and ageism.

The focus on superstars and the fear of being outshined.

------
aa143
I think there is something to this. This is an interesting article showing
that on GitHub, female coders have their code approved at a higher rate than
men - but only if their gender is not disclosed.

[https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technolog...](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women-
considered-better-coders-hide-gender-github)

~~~
LeeHwang
That article has been thoroughly disproven on multiple sites, multiple times.

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-
exci...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-
about-that-github-study/)

~~~
itsdrewmiller
Seems like this does still suggest at least that in the aggregate females
should have their code approved at roughly the same rate as males, which is
far from what FB showed.

~~~
LeeHwang
Facebook hasn't released any of their data. They have said normalized for
experience, the gender bias goes away. So I can't agree with you based on the
WSJ article.

Also I personally have a hard time believing a company with Sheryl Sandberg as
it's COO would lie about their conclusions. She is a strong positive force for
increasing women in tech.

~~~
itsdrewmiller
They said normalized for rank (aka promotion level), not experience, which one
might reasonably expect to also be influenced by bias. The study that showed a
bias normalized for FB experience.

If Sheryl Sandberg personally says she looked into this and agrees that the
study is mistaken and there is no statistically significant bias, that would
definitely impact by assessment. I agree that she is great.

~~~
LeeHwang
I don't seem to understand why you refuse to take Jay Parikh at his word. He
is a indian minority who stands for diversity, and yes he often works very
closely with Sheryl for many years. Jay Parikh is not a suit or corporate hr
person at all. [http://www.today.com/popculture/sheryl-sandberg-speaks-
new-g...](http://www.today.com/popculture/sheryl-sandberg-speaks-new-
generation-women-lean-graduates-2D79500260)

~~~
itsdrewmiller
Has he made a public comment on this? The only reporting I have seen has been
third hand. I am taking the reporting at its word, which is that he did an
analysis using alternative dependent variables that showed no significant
difference. I'm also asserting that his analysis is more likely to be flawed
than the original study, since promotion level is not clearly an independent
variable whereas Facebook tenure is.

If the facebook engineering department is biased against women, they are
likely to both promote deserving women less and reject their code more. If you
do an analysis using promotion level to predict code rejection, you may not
see any evidence of bias in this scenario, no matter how severe it actually
is. Do you disagree with this possibility? Can you point me to anything that
Facebook has said or done that explains why they are not concerned about it?

~~~
LeeHwang
The research you are trying to dismiss several times in this thread as "suits"
was done by Parikh.

After reading your replies to myself and other users in this thread,You
clearly have an issue with him, by the rather extreme lengths you've gone to
discredit him in this thread.

I don't want to be part of your crusade against an ally of diversity.

~~~
itsdrewmiller
I had never heard of him before this story. I think it is unfair of you to
accuse me of some vendetta merely because I don't take the convenient,
proprietary, flawed company study results over the better designed and more
open engineering results.

------
aa143
Here's a link to the full research paper:
[https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/](https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/)

------
throwawy1234121
Interesting article title, sad I can't read it. It requires a log in.

------
phoneyphone
Paywall removed: [http://outline.com/CF3DMU](http://outline.com/CF3DMU)

------
drspacemonkey
Anyone got a non-paywall link?

~~~
longerthoughts
You can skip the paywall through facebook. Append the article url to the end
of this:

[https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=](https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=)

~~~
drspacemonkey
Thanks, much appreciated. Especially since I don't have to log into facebook
to make it work.

------
draw_down
I certainly don't want to discount the presence of sexism (by the way you can
just call it that, "gender bias" feels a bit euphemistic IMO). But I've had
some interesting conversations with female colleagues wherein they are
surprised that I share many of the same frustrating experiences they do. (I'm
white and male.)

I think this stuff happens if you don't fit someone's idea of what a developer
"should be", and that occurs not only in sexist ways but other ways as well.
Of course it's rare for a person to just come out and admit they don't respect
you, let alone why. But I suspect things like my appearance and my manner of
speaking represent me as insufficiently nerdy to people who care about such
things, which results in the type of shit they describe.

Again, I don't want to diminish the problem of sexism or other forms of
discrimination in our industry. I just suspect that for those who are affected
by it, all would not be well even if the discrimination were to evaporate
overnight. Sadly.

~~~
jaemison
That feeling of being "insufficiently nerdy" and the mild paranoia that arises
from being subconsciously labelled as such by your peers is one of many things
I've learned to deal with on a daily basis. I'm certain there are many others
that can relate. I think part of the problem is that we don't have these
empathy-building conversations at work, which is a shame because there is
evidence that empathy towards teammates is part of building successful
teams[1].

In general, I wish we would stop framing discussions of improving diversity in
tech as a zero-sum game in which the collective experience of one group is by
default more valid than the collective experience of another group. Bad hiring
heuristics and mental shortcuts for what makes a person a good engineer hurt
everyone who gets eliminated from contention before being given a chance to do
the job, not just the person who checks off the most boxes on the EEOC
reporting section of the job application.

[1] - [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-
lear...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-
its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html)

------
stefantalpalaru
Here's a copy without the paywall: [http://www.4-traders.com/FACEBOOK-
INC-10547141/news/Facebook...](http://www.4-traders.com/FACEBOOK-
INC-10547141/news/Facebook-Female-Engineers-Claim-Gender-Bias-24309258/)

tl;dr: diversity hires noticed that they have 35% more code review rejections
than the awful meritocracy crowd, blamed it on the oppressive patriarchy

Excellent opportunity to remember the story of Saron Yitbarek - a fresh
developer out of a 4 month Ruby on Rails course who was hired by Microsoft for
more than a year, but not as a developer, because technical interviews are
sexist. The software giant hired her as a project manager for a newly created
program to... teach students how to write CVs. The outcome?
[https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-dont-belong-in-
tech-3d73d...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-dont-belong-in-
tech-3d73d8fd6f34)

------
whywhywhywhy
> So, Facebook’s argument is essentially that because there are not as many
> women in higher-ranked engineering roles, their code is subject to more
> scrutiny. But it’s problematic that women, which only make up 17 percent of
> Facebook’s technical department, are not in higher-ranking roles

Think it's time SV faced up to the fact it needs affirmative action for
engineers who identify as women. This problem isn't going away, anonymised
code reviews would be beneficial too to fight male managers in-built
prejudices.

