
At Facebook female engineers have their code rejected 35% more than males - rickr
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/02/facebook-gender-bias-female-engineers-code
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cperciva
_Last year, a study of coders on the open source repository GitHub found that
code written by women was actually more likely to be approved by fellow coders
than code written by men – but only if the female coders hid their gender.
Female coders with profiles that made their gender “identifiable” had their
code rejected more often than male coders._

That study has been so thoroughly debunked at this point that I'm inclined to
assume bad faith on the part of any journalist who cites it.

~~~
Iv
Never heard of this study or it's debunking. I would owe you 2 TIL if you
could provide some sources!

~~~
forgottenpass
[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/)

~~~
melbourne7
that's GitHub, not Facebook

~~~
forgottenpass
Did you even read cperciva's comment upthread?

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flukus
> The Facebook analysis took into account engineers’ “level” within the
> company and found “no statistically significant difference” between female
> and male engineers within the same level.

> Parikh attributed the difference that the original analysis found to “the
> difference in gender distribution between levels”, meaning the fact that
> Facebook has more female engineers at lower levels than higher levels.

This is a case of damned if you do damned if you don't. If they try to
artificially increase gender diversity then this is an expected outcome.

So now we've created more artificial diversity do we have to extend the gender
discrimination so that women are treated differently in the code review stage
as well?

~~~
mc32
Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation.
With that in mind, it makes sense to "promote" fields to women where they are
a minority and promote fields to men where they are a minority.

At the same time, while we address the imbalances, we should be careful not to
scare off people by making things sound worse then they are. Welcome people
rather than shame people into acceptance. It's not easy and will not happen
overnight.

Keep in mind, women can do quite well even in societies where women are
exposed to greater patriarchy --India, Russia, China. It would seem clear it's
also a cultural issue --i.e. as a culture women don't see (to use a phrase)
"STEM" as a necessary ticket out but also it's not ingrained yet as good or
cool enough to make people _want_ to go into those fields rather than say
social sciences.

~~~
lj3
> Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation.

Source? I've seen nothing that proves that gender balance is good for our
economy or our future.

~~~
mc32
One circumstantial word: Japan. Demographic equality isn't necessary, but
acceptance and encouragement so that they may envision themselves in those
jobs as a viable option, else we take the lazy way out and import labor to
meet demand.

~~~
malandrew
But how is addressing a gender imbalance a solution to that problem. There are
many ways to address a shortage of talent in an occupation besides moving
people from one gender from one occupation to another, especially the
naturally talented (nb: intelligent is a highly heritable trait). Furthermore
that solution will likely just result in a talent shortage in the occupation
you're moving people away from, requiring other solutions like bringing in
talent from abroad.

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thinkaboutit113
Reposting my comment from the other thread here.

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.

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retrogradeorbit
Why not blind the code reviews? So the reviewing engineers have no idea who
wrote the code? Do that for a while and see if the 35% persists. It might go
down. It might persist. It might go up.

~~~
IshKebab
Difficult to work on a project without knowing who your coworkers are...

~~~
retrogradeorbit
I mean for the purpose of a study. Not for day to day coding.

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diyseguy
I've seen this before. I've also seen plenty code written from developers at
higher levels that really should have been reviewed with far more scrutiny -
but because of politics, was practically rubber stamped with hardly a comment.
IOW, developers at higher levels don't necessarily write better code, often it
is worse.

I think this could be improved by a system of code review anonymization that
sends code reviews out - company wide - without identifying author info.

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mankash666
Correlation!=causation.

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ouid
isn't this a hopelessly entangled measurement?

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19eightyfour
Sexism against women is real. Just look at movies. Audiences for blockbuster
Hollywood movies are almost completely mixed. But how many leads and stars are
male versus female?

And this is movies. This is a fictional world. This is where you can rewrite
the rules and depict the world as you would like to show it. But Hollywood
still shows more men in lead roles than women.

So the representation of women on screen is not equal to the representation of
women in real life. But it could be. And it's not even equal to an ideal
representation of women based on equality. But it could be. Because it's a
movie you can make it however you want to make it.

~~~
johnfn
My guess to an explanation of this phenomenon would be that guys don't really
watch many movies with women leads, but the inverse is not true.

Is this true?

~~~
19eightyfour
It might be. But the sexism is economically based by consumer choices. But I
just feel, " sorry that's not good enough, Hollywood, Can not you be doing
something better?" I mean I they spend lots of money to promote particular
narratives, values and ideas. Hollywood is based on the idea that you can
persuade the population of something and promote certain values. So what I'm
wondering is why doesn't Hollywood when it has the free choice to do so
promote certain values to sway the population and promote equality.

