10 ms·

Facebook's female engineers claim gender bias

58 points by forgingahead 9y ago

appetizer 9y ago
New study reveals Facebook's male engineers are pedantic af
cynokit 9y ago
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.
- BlackjackCF 9y ago
  Ready for there to be a whole bunch of comments about how it's easier to get hired as female engineer because of diversity quotas...
  - e1g 9y ago
    > please recognize the determination it takes to make it that far > ...it's easier to get hired as female engineer because of diversity quotas... I had seen both of these play out through my partner. She was consistently invited to interview for positions significantly ahead of her experience at the time. She declined these offers on ethical grounds, but it did seem that the surface area of opportunities was expanded because to her gender and age. Conversely, when she did choose a new role well within her bulletproof expertise, she would be systematically harassed and undermine by otherwise well-meaning people. For example, she's had a dotted-line manager suggest a threesome (in writing, over WhatsApp), offers to work from the client's office because "we need a girl there" (this would make the company look better), and changes to her briefings to sound "...maybe less you" (she had spent years doing conflict resolutions and suicide hotline counseling). Both points can be true at the same time: women in tech (or finance, or law, or consulting) may have more options presented, but almost none of them are healthy. Working as a female seems to provide the same advantages as going out as a disabled - yes, you have special parking offers and can get to the front door quicker, but no-one will swap places with you.
- whywhywhywhy 9y ago
  >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 9y ago
    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.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- maverick_iceman 9y ago
  Evidence?
- iagovar 9y ago
  Can I get this recognition if I get into nursing?
stefantalpalaru 9y ago
Here's a copy without the paywall: http://www.4-traders.com/FACEBOOK-INC-10547141/news/Facebook-Female-Engineers-Claim-Gender-Bias-24309258/ http://www.4-traders.com/FACEBOOK-INC-10547141/news/Facebook... 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-3d73d8fd6f34 https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-dont-belong-in-tech-3d73d...
tom-_- 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
- pipiipiippi 9y ago
iplaw 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
throwawy1234121 9y ago
Interesting article title, sad I can't read it. It requires a log in.
drspacemonkey 9y ago
Anyone got a non-paywall link?
- longerthoughts 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Thanks, much appreciated. Especially since I don't have to log into facebook to make it work.
whywhywhywhy 9y ago
> 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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ng12 9y ago
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.
- fapjacks 9y ago
  Right, it would be great if we could see the ("anonymized") dataset.
- itsdrewmiller 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
jaemison 9y ago
Engadget summary: https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/02/facebook-coding-sexism-allegation/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/02/facebook-coding-sexism-a... 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.
- ng12 9y ago
  When I was doing a lot of code reviews all I wanted was team members I could trust -- somebody who could sit down, hack out a feature, and I just had to hit the merge button. Every single comment I made was more time out of my day. It sounds like a massive cultural problem if it's that hard to get code merged.
- Afforess 9y ago
  > 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.
afinlayson 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
draw_down 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...
ryanwaggoner 9y ago
I initially read this headline as "Facebook's female engineer claims gender bias", which would make a funny Onion headline.
bl4ckm0r3 9y ago
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.
- appetizer 9y ago
  the weird thing is that in general (outside of programming) there hasn't been a gender divide in entry level roles, and the separate paths of life and career development become apparent later on yet are so extreme that it tilts all the demographics. so courting more women for entry level roles that happen to be programming isn't going to change that.
- npelly 9y ago
  I've never seen suggestions that Facebook has a lower hiring bar for females, and i'd be really surprised if this was the case. The playbook is to aggressively attract female (and other diversity) candidates into the top of the hiring funnel, but keep the hiring bar equal. Source - I used to be a hiring manager at a similar large-cap tech company.
  - bl4ckm0r3 9y ago
    Wasn't specifically talking about facebook, more of a generic situation here. You can't attract good female talents, if you don't have female devs in your company. Also in the market there are a lot of junior candidates (and a lot of them coming from a different background and just trying to land a job that will allow them to live in san francisco). It is easy to blame sexism (riding the wave now) when it may just be that some code isn't good... At least according to this article the bias has more to do with the experience of some coder. https://news.fastcompany.com/at-facebook-women-coders-are-judged-by-a-harsher-standard-report-4036426 https://news.fastcompany.com/at-facebook-women-coders-are-ju...
Geekette 9y ago
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...
phoneyphone 9y ago
Paywall removed: http://outline.com/CF3DMU http://outline.com/CF3DMU
thinkaboutit113 9y ago
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.
aa143 9y ago
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/technology/2016/feb/12/women-considered-better-coders-hide-gender-github https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technolog...
- LeeHwang 9y ago
  That article has been thoroughly disproven on multiple sites, multiple times. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-about-that-github-study/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...
  - itsdrewmiller 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        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.
aa143 9y ago
Here's a link to the full research paper: https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/ https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/

58 points by forgingahead 9y ago

New study reveals Facebook's male engineers are pedantic af

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.

BlackjackCF 9y ago
Ready for there to be a whole bunch of comments about how it's easier to get hired as female engineer because of diversity quotas...
- e1g 9y ago
  > please recognize the determination it takes to make it that far > ...it's easier to get hired as female engineer because of diversity quotas... I had seen both of these play out through my partner. She was consistently invited to interview for positions significantly ahead of her experience at the time. She declined these offers on ethical grounds, but it did seem that the surface area of opportunities was expanded because to her gender and age. Conversely, when she did choose a new role well within her bulletproof expertise, she would be systematically harassed and undermine by otherwise well-meaning people. For example, she's had a dotted-line manager suggest a threesome (in writing, over WhatsApp), offers to work from the client's office because "we need a girl there" (this would make the company look better), and changes to her briefings to sound "...maybe less you" (she had spent years doing conflict resolutions and suicide hotline counseling). Both points can be true at the same time: women in tech (or finance, or law, or consulting) may have more options presented, but almost none of them are healthy. Working as a female seems to provide the same advantages as going out as a disabled - yes, you have special parking offers and can get to the front door quicker, but no-one will swap places with you.
whywhywhywhy 9y ago
>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 9y ago
  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.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
maverick_iceman 9y ago
Evidence?
iagovar 9y ago
Can I get this recognition if I get into nursing?

stefantalpalaru 9y ago

Here's a copy without the paywall: http://www.4-traders.com/FACEBOOK-INC-10547141/news/Facebook-Female-Engineers-Claim-Gender-Bias-24309258/ http://www.4-traders.com/FACEBOOK-INC-10547141/news/Facebook... 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-3d73d8fd6f34 https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-dont-belong-in-tech-3d73d...

tom-_- 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
pipiipiippi 9y ago

iplaw 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago

throwawy1234121 9y ago

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

drspacemonkey 9y ago

Anyone got a non-paywall link?

longerthoughts 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Thanks, much appreciated. Especially since I don't have to log into facebook to make it work.

whywhywhywhy 9y ago

> 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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

ng12 9y ago

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.

fapjacks 9y ago
Right, it would be great if we could see the ("anonymized") dataset.
itsdrewmiller 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago

jaemison 9y ago

Engadget summary: https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/02/facebook-coding-sexism-allegation/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/02/facebook-coding-sexism-a... 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.

ng12 9y ago
When I was doing a lot of code reviews all I wanted was team members I could trust -- somebody who could sit down, hack out a feature, and I just had to hit the merge button. Every single comment I made was more time out of my day. It sounds like a massive cultural problem if it's that hard to get code merged.
Afforess 9y ago
> 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.

afinlayson 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

draw_down 9y ago

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 9y ago
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-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...

ryanwaggoner 9y ago

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

bl4ckm0r3 9y ago

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.

appetizer 9y ago
the weird thing is that in general (outside of programming) there hasn't been a gender divide in entry level roles, and the separate paths of life and career development become apparent later on yet are so extreme that it tilts all the demographics. so courting more women for entry level roles that happen to be programming isn't going to change that.
npelly 9y ago
I've never seen suggestions that Facebook has a lower hiring bar for females, and i'd be really surprised if this was the case. The playbook is to aggressively attract female (and other diversity) candidates into the top of the hiring funnel, but keep the hiring bar equal. Source - I used to be a hiring manager at a similar large-cap tech company.
- bl4ckm0r3 9y ago
  Wasn't specifically talking about facebook, more of a generic situation here. You can't attract good female talents, if you don't have female devs in your company. Also in the market there are a lot of junior candidates (and a lot of them coming from a different background and just trying to land a job that will allow them to live in san francisco). It is easy to blame sexism (riding the wave now) when it may just be that some code isn't good... At least according to this article the bias has more to do with the experience of some coder. https://news.fastcompany.com/at-facebook-women-coders-are-judged-by-a-harsher-standard-report-4036426 https://news.fastcompany.com/at-facebook-women-coders-are-ju...

Geekette 9y ago

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...

phoneyphone 9y ago

Paywall removed: http://outline.com/CF3DMU http://outline.com/CF3DMU

thinkaboutit113 9y ago

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.

aa143 9y ago

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

LeeHwang 9y ago
That article has been thoroughly disproven on multiple sites, multiple times. http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-about-that-github-study/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...
- itsdrewmiller 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.

aa143 9y ago

Here's a link to the full research paper: https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/ https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/