
Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims - mgiannopoulos
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/2/15517302/facebook-female-engineers-gender-bias-studies-report
======
LeeHwang
Basically a dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14247221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14247221)

The Verge is using the WSJ as the source.

------
randomact2452
Creating a throwaway since I've taken part of this internal discussion at
Facebook. Once normalized for skill level (i.e. junior engineer, engineer,
senior engineer) the level of rejection between genders is the same.

~~~
jjawssd
Why is your username green?

~~~
jakelazaroff
Why is parent being downvoted for asking a simple question?

~~~
kordless
Facebook. See my comment.

------
BugsJustFindMe
tldr This article is terrible.

Maybe this is a "Facebook rejects..." story. Maybe it's a story about how bad
Facebook is.

But if you keep reading past the introduction it sure sounds a lot more like a
"male engineers reject..." story.

And then if you keep reading some more it sure sounds like a "code is rejected
proportionally to engineer seniority..." story, which is not a story.

And then at the very very end, you finally get to the only part of this
terrible article that makes any sense:

> _the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and
> across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be._

Facebook talking about itself is the only honestly presented thing on the
page.

~~~
hyperdunc
That part doesn't make much sense either because gender representation isn't a
legitimate concept. Individuals have different strengths which may help them
succeed if their pursuits use those strengths. This results in uneven gender
distributions within industries and there's nothing wrong with that.

Unless you think there is some sort of overt discrimination happening that's
stopping females becoming senior engineers, in which case you'll need to
define it.

~~~
geofft
Can you provide evidence for the specific claim that women, in particular, are
statistically-significantly less strong at the software engineering industry,
in particular?

(I buy the argument that there are statistically-significant differences in
_some_ strengths that apply in _some_ industries, yes. I'm curious to see how
this applies to software engineering in particular.)

~~~
m1el
Let's assume for a moment, that engineering requires intelligence, and to be a
top engineer you need to be in the top X% percentile of the population.

As it turns out the distribution of IQ in men and women is
different[0][1][2][3], with men having more variation (more extremely dumb men
and more extremely smart men), and an ever so slightly higher median (men have
slightly higher IQ on average). These small differences lead to huge
difference in representation of _exceptionally_ smart people, because of how
normal distribution works. These differences manifest themselves in tasks
requiring high intelligence, such as chess, go, engineering and software
development.

I say this as a scientific statement, with zero sexism implied. I believe that
people should not be afraid to state scientific truths, no matter how
controversial they may seem.

[0]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606001115)

[1]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886911...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886911002212)

[2]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606000250)

[3]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289604...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289604000492)

~~~
wf
As it turns out women have barely had any time at all being afforded the same
privileges as men[0], and that's just the United States, there remain cultures
that are extremely oppressive to women. It also turns out we still tell women
from a young age that "they can't".[1] It also turns out there are a ton of
biases pushing women out of STEM[2][3][4][5].

So when you cite evidence that says men are smarter than women conducted by
men standing on the shoulders of a society built for men, you can't be shocked
when people question it.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_the_United_States)

[1]
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6323/389](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6323/389)

[2] [http://www.uchastings.edu/news/articles/2015/01/double-
jeopa...](http://www.uchastings.edu/news/articles/2015/01/double-jeopardy-
report.pdf)

[3]
[http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.full)

[4]
[http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full)

~~~
m1el
I understand that there are biases against women in our society, and I don't
argue with that.

I argue that there are biological differences between men and women, and these
differences are causing different representation in STEM fields.

I would also say that today, we're living in the most equal opportunity
society than ever before. Let the free market sort itself out. If you try to
_artificially_ increase the proportion of women in STEM fields, you will
decrease the quality of engineers. I'm sorry, but that's how it is.

> So when you cite evidence that says men are smarter than women conducted by
> men standing on the shoulders of a society built for men, you can't be
> shocked when people question it.

So, did they use a flawed methodology? Were these studies sexist? Could you
point in which way these studies are sexist? Do you disagree that males often
have higher variance in different traits in many species? Do you disagree that
men have higher variance in IQ?

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
> _I argue that there are biological differences between men and women, and
> these differences are causing different representation in STEM fields._

I argue that you don't actually have any reason to believe that the
differences are biological instead of social. Certainly, while extremely
interesting (I mean that. Not sarcasm.), none of your links demonstrate it.
Your links claim to show a difference, but they do not claim to explain the
cause of said difference.

> _I would also say that today, we 're living in the most equal opportunity
> society than ever before._

You could say all kinds of things and more. But, and I'm not agreeing here
that it is actually true, because I'm not fully convinced that it is, even if
it _is_ true, being better-than isn't the same as being good.

> _Let the free market sort itself out._

Only a properly regulated market ever sorts itself out. Otherwise you end up
with natural monopolies, because barriers to entry are historically
compounded. This has always been true of marketplaces.

> _So, did they use a flawed methodology? Were these studies sexist?_

Well, one flaw is that your conclusions don't follow from the studies.

~~~
m1el
> I argue that you don't actually have any reason to believe that the
> differences are biological instead of social.

I could provide studies on how IQ development is set by genetics and very
early childhood. So yes, I _do_ have a reason to believe IQ is biological.

> Only a properly regulated market ever sorts itself out.

This _is_ true, but "we must hire women otherwise people think we're sexist"
is _not_ a properly regulated market.

> Well, one flaw is that your conclusions don't follow from the studies.

But my conclusions _do_ follow from studies. If you take top 2% of people by
IQ from a random population sample, you expect to have more men. The same
would be true if you took the bottom 2%, but that doesn't interest anyone.

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
> _I could provide..._

Well _I_ could provide a tortoise that speaks seven different languages.
Saying what you _could_ provide is fairly bad form.

> _and very early childhood._

Wait, how early? Which part of childhood is the genetic part? Heck, what about
the potential for non-uniform distribution of teratogens? Has that even been
studied?

> _but "we must hire women otherwise people think we're sexist" is not a
> properly regulated market_

"We should prefer to choose an equally qualified woman because not only is she
presently equally qualified, but she has achieved being equally qualified in
an environment that in-many-small-ways-collectively-and-constantly tries to
prevent it" is, though. There is no shortage of well-qualified individuals in
the world. And if you don't agree, then we must first begin another
conversation on what exactly you think qualifies someone to develop software.

> _But my conclusions do follow from studies._

They certainly don't follow from the ones you linked, even though you said
they would. I know that because I read the studies you linked. So maybe these
other ones also don't support your conclusions any better?

> _If you take top 2% of people by IQ from a random population sample, you
> expect to have more men._

Maybe. Now tell me the part of the study that says why. And further tell me
the part that indicates a positive correlation with success in computer
software production. And then tell me the part that indicates positive
correlation with representation in the field. And then tell me the part that
indicates...heck, maybe that indicates that g is even a useful measurement to
begin with.

Because you said, and I quote, "[biological] differences are causing different
representation in STEM fields", which is an unsupported conclusion.

------
savanaly
A couple of standout points from this article:

* the data itself hasn't been released so no one outside of Facebook has in any way analyzed it, we're relying on their analysis and reportage of that analysis to be correct

* the rejection rate is not just higher for female engineers, it's a lot higher: 35%

* Facebook is confident that the effect is not due to gender bias (scrutinizing female workers' code more closely) but that it's due to a confounding effect of engineering rank (females tend to be lower rank, and lower ranks tend to have more rejections through some mechanism)

In other words, we definitely need more study in the area before I would be
confident drawing any important conclusions. It is a fascinating step forward
though.

~~~
Crespyl
> through some mechanism

It is hardly surprising or novel that junior/less experienced developers will
write code that has more problems and thus gets rejected more often.

------
zobzu
these articles are sensationalist garbage and just do a disservice to anyone
having actual injustice

~~~
0xfab1
That's why I usually open HN comment section first. I try not to give my
precious clicks to this kind of articles.

------
yomly
With someone like Sheryl Sandberg heading up Facebook's operations, it would
be hard to believe that there weren't mandates to achieve gender parity
starting from the top.

That Facebook hasn't achieved gender parity yet would suggest to me that the
world hasn't yet caught up with supplying the demand for female employees at
various levels of the corporate ladder without it impacting their business
operations.

------
LeifCarrotson
I've heard that the opposite of this suggested bias ought to be consciously
corrected.

If the stereotype for a senior engineer is a balding white male with glasses,
and you have two prospective engineers with otherwise identical resumes and
work histories: one balding white male with glasses and even a pocket
protector on his white shirt, and one black woman with a wild T-shirt, which
would you hire? The answer I'd heard before was that you should hire the non-
conformist, because they've risen to identical positions and accomplishments
despite the bias against them at each step, while the stereotypical engineer
was probably assumed to belong in the positions they attained. So you should
choose the stuttering surgeon and the messy lawyer when given the opportunity.

(No idea where I heard it or what the phenomenon is called, though - anyone
remember this?)

~~~
panzer_wyrm
[https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-
surg...](https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-
surgeons-23b0e2cf6d52)

Taleb - Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons

~~~
LeifCarrotson
That's it, thanks!

------
jlebrech
I think the industry is suffering from the cobra effect right now
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)

~~~
ch4s3
Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?

~~~
leshow
Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is
not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based
on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not
good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality
problem.

~~~
ch4s3
You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they
lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in
droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an
unsolved problem in hiring?

To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any
satisfying answers.

~~~
shados
You can still lower the bar below "hiring straight out of college in droves".

Hiring more self taught and bootcamp people is often advocated as a way to
increase diversity, and a lot of roles don't require a college degree (plus a
lot of self taught and bootcamp folks are very good). However, on a large
enough dataset, they will be weaker candidates. So if you use those sources to
improve diversity, you'll end up with a correlation between diverse hires and
more junior devs. Which screws up with every other metrics you'll look at.

~~~
douche
I'm not sure you're going to correct the perceived gender/racial/whatever
imbalances if you start hiring self-taught programmers and bootcamp grads in
droves, just looking at the typical demographics of the people that self-
select into those cohorts.

~~~
shados
there's actually quite a few bootcamps and social programs to help minorities
break into the field, actually.

------
deelowe
Can't read the linked article. Did the study look further into the gender bias
assumptions beyond the simple female vs male statistic (e.g by anonymizing
code submissions)?

~~~
oneplusone
> 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.

~~~
sitkack
I'd love to see a distribution of level, age and years in industry, salary by
age. If Fb has put more effort into hiring female engineers directly from
college, then they will probably skew junior. The answer is probably not that
simple and as you mentioned, all women are probably being challenged more than
their male counterparts.

The general tone of this recent article on HN [1] I think was quite negative
towards the OP, more so than the median. I have seen similar behavior in code
and architecture reviews, interviews, etc for women at companies I have
worked. Everything literally turns into a qual. Everything they do is judged
to much higher standard. Or even non-sensical standard. It is still the case,
that when I come across a woman in dev, she is most likely a freak'n bad ass
and has a really thick skin. To me, this shows that we have not yet achieved
equality, otherwise there would be more _average_ programmers who are women.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14227892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14227892)

------
pvnick
I'm very torn on these kinds of studies. In my field we see a lot of studies
looking at gender and racial disparities in healthcare offered (e.g. what
kinds of _______ therapy are prescribed to various racial groups). While such
disparities are probably important in some cases, the "why" is generally not
addressed in the study outcome, and rather the results are open to all sorts
of interpretations based on our biases.

And then of course any disparities, properly normalized for alternative
factors (or not), have to be corrected. Very messy science. It's also easy and
politically expedient science - these days we're obsessed with inequality, and
if you just comb around you're bound to find some statistically significant
disparities and that gets everyone's attention. If researchers were trying to
investigate population-level thoughtcrime, this is what it might look like.

------
anothercomment
If anything, they should check the rejected code and verify that it was not
worthy of rejection, that is, it really was likely the gender of the submitter
that caused the rejection.

If higher rank of coder would make rejection less likely, it would also not
bear well on the code reviews.

------
itsdrewmiller
Several other sources for this story were flagged out yesterday, even though
this is very clearly a topic of interest on hacker news. This one is also
currently showing up as flagged. Curious who doesn't want to grapple with an
evidence-based look at bias in a tech leader.

Given that the engineer-lead study found this impact when controlling for
seniority at FB while the suit-lead one didn't for rank, it certainly raises
the question of why women have a lower rank for a given seniority. Charitably
maybe men have more experience coming in, but if that was truly the case they
could have used that as their input variable to avoid the obvious follow up
concerns.

------
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.

------
Fragoel2
Seems to me a case of Simpson's Paradox, already proven to be the cause of
wrong conclusions in the past in similar stories:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox)

------
sova
Just embarrassingly stupid. The playing field is not at all equal yet, and
until then a meaningful comparison will not take place. /2c

------
dlwdlw
I think to understand gender discrimination we need to understand what hazing
is all about. A basic definition may be "An unpleasant experience to gate
access". At first, I thought it was about building bonds but what I believe
hazing actually does is solidify the boundary between in-group and out-group
via a specific and unique obstacle.

The enphasis of this boundary creates a space for privileged information
amongst the network. those internal to the network have access to resources
others do not, most often in the form of people and the information in their
head. The actual quality of information amongst groups is probably roughly the
same, but with in-network information, there is more willingness to be open
about this information. This is because information can be infinitely
duplicated. Giving out information reduces your competitive advantage just as
teaching someone everything you know would as well.

Take away the concept of groups and you remove overt hazing. However,
individuals exist along with their gated information. This information
includes their deepest secrets and fears, their de-facto model of the
organization, as well as the secrets to their strengths. Regarding this last
one, if you have a high enough gated privilege, he may just give you a link to
the resource he used. If you don't, he may just try and explain it himself.
And if you have low privilege, he'll be too busy.

Most organizational skills are NOT generic skills learned in school. They are
often tips about organizational management, who to ask about what as well as
the hidden mental models that keep the legacy code running.

Take this potential acenario: If a women asks a man how the fuck the shitty
legacy code works, there is a threat. The woman who is fresh from school has
some ivory tower ideas and the man is threatened because he knew he took some
shortcuts. This manifests itself as arrogance when explaining, perhaps even
just telling the woman to just figure it out as some sort of hazing test. One
she is jaded enough by organizational existence will no longer be a threat.

So there is a constant dynamic of men needing to orove themselves to other men
and women. When women are involved, the need is higher, creating more
arrogance and a higher power distance. Many woman know this, which is why they
are more likely to say: "I heard you were the expert in this area, could you
give me a few pointers? I'm SOOO bad at this stuff. " while other men might
"What the fuck is this shit?!"

Men basically have 2 choices to extract information. Playing the mentee, or
playing a high status individual that the other person has to prove themselves
to. Women often only have the first because culturally they are socially
punished for aggressive behavior.

One root cultural stem is that a man mist be in some eay superior to a woman
to "deserve" her. Gender roles have the man playing the hero. This imperative
prevents men seeking help from women but also systematically prevents women
from reaching high status without overt and obvious superiority in an aspect.

This last part is very important. The issue is NOT about actual skill. Out
society is set up fairly well in that it is still mostly a meritocracy. The
best rise to the top, and this includes women.

The issue is that your ability is determined by your access to experience and
attitudes. (No longer knowledge, e.g. Blacks being banned from libraries or
similar) This can create a headwind or tailwind for you in different
directions.

Also, in places where measuring skill is flawed and has huge variance, women
often have to doubly prove themselves because their "scores" are artificially
deflated while an extroverted tall white males might be inflated. From an
organizational standpoint this is in some ways even "good" because the org may
bot be sexist, but it sure as hell wants its ICs to fall in line. That entails
a manager or leader that can utilize aggression and status.

So, to sum up, culturally women are often forced to play a low status role,
and men are forced into high status and often more high pressure roles. From a
romantic but somewhat chauvanistic view, this is "protecting our daughters and
wives". In reality, you fake it till you make it. Men have the paths to power
opened for them while women are stuck having to out on fake smiles. (Though
often self imposed due to fear. But then again, that fear is another cultural
manifestation of boys being taught to face their fears to protect the girls
who aren't expected to do anythinf)

