6 ms·

At Facebook female engineers have their code rejected 35% more than males

30 points by rickr 9y ago

flukus 9y ago
> 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?
- untog 9y ago
  Surely the fact that skills are equal within levels yet more men get promoted is a problem? You seem to be implying that promoting more women would be diversity for diversity's sake, but the data suggests that it would address an imbalance that has nothing to do with skill.
  - flukus 9y ago
    > Surely the fact that skills are equal within levels yet more men get promoted is a problem? Only if you started with an even distribution. If the workforce was 20% female today but only 10% a few years ago then you would expect fewer women at higher levels. > You seem to be implying that promoting more women would be diversity for diversity's sake, but the data suggests that it would address an imbalance that has nothing to do with skill. That's interesting in it's own right, but it could suggest a lot of things, like the ability of their outreach programs to attract the best female talent.
  - loco5niner 9y ago
    > Surely the fact that skills are equal within levels yet more men get promoted is a problem? Not really. If skill levels are equal within levels, it would indicate that the proper people are getting promoted, regardless of gender.
- mc32 9y ago
  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.
  - flukus 9y ago
    > 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 filed to men where they are a minority. I agree, but the promotion is coming at a time and place that's way too late. Get the 14 year old girls to start experimenting with programming instead of worrying about being labelled a geek and then you'll start to see some real progress. Get toy stores to have electronic toys that aren't always in the boys section. Just don't expect the business world to fix a cultural problem that it didn't create and can't fix.
  - ramblerman 9y ago
    > Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation Gender equality is a good thing. I'm not sure why the assumption is that this means perfect parity across every industry.
  - lj3 9y ago
    > 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 9y ago
19eightyfour 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
- rimliu 9y ago
  I you sure it is no real representation? Last I checked male leads outnumbered females in real world too.
  - 19eightyfour 9y ago
    There's that right. But not all stories are about the corporate world or something like that. A lot of stories are about relationships or Adventures or fictional stories completely. In The stories of our lives, representation is mixed and balanced. So I don't think on-screen world does represent the real world... outside of extending say, inequality present in the corporate world, through narrative, to other Realms where it is not present or not as present. So I think that's a form of bias creation and misrepresentation that doesn't work to promote equality... Or reality. Secondly, movies are fictional worlds so they can represent whatever their creators choose them to represent. They could be representing more equally. They're not. To me the misrepresentation of reality and the bias representation of the fictional world in Hollywood movies is a really clear example of sexism. Just one example and I'm a huge sci-fi fan of the Alien series and Prometheus series. But I was shocked that in the trailer for the new Prometheus movie not only is pretty much everybody white but pretty much everyone he's a man. And I'm like come on it's the future surely the creators can imagine that things are going to be more equal.
ouid 9y ago
isn't this a hopelessly entangled measurement?
cperciva 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Never heard of this study or it's debunking. I would owe you 2 TIL if you could provide some sources!
  - forgottenpass 9y ago
    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...
    - melbourne7 9y ago
      that's GitHub, not Facebook
      - forgottenpass 9y ago
        Did you even read cperciva's comment upthread?
    - Iv 9y ago
      Thanks a lot!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mankash666 9y ago
Correlation!=causation.
thinkaboutit113 9y ago
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.
retrogradeorbit 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Difficult to work on a project without knowing who your coworkers are...
  - retrogradeorbit 9y ago
    I mean for the purpose of a study. Not for day to day coding.
diyseguy 9y ago
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.

30 points by rickr 9y ago

> 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?

untog 9y ago
Surely the fact that skills are equal within levels yet more men get promoted is a problem? You seem to be implying that promoting more women would be diversity for diversity's sake, but the data suggests that it would address an imbalance that has nothing to do with skill.
- flukus 9y ago
  > Surely the fact that skills are equal within levels yet more men get promoted is a problem? Only if you started with an even distribution. If the workforce was 20% female today but only 10% a few years ago then you would expect fewer women at higher levels. > You seem to be implying that promoting more women would be diversity for diversity's sake, but the data suggests that it would address an imbalance that has nothing to do with skill. That's interesting in it's own right, but it could suggest a lot of things, like the ability of their outreach programs to attract the best female talent.
- loco5niner 9y ago
  > Surely the fact that skills are equal within levels yet more men get promoted is a problem? Not really. If skill levels are equal within levels, it would indicate that the proper people are getting promoted, regardless of gender.
mc32 9y ago
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.
- flukus 9y ago
  > 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 filed to men where they are a minority. I agree, but the promotion is coming at a time and place that's way too late. Get the 14 year old girls to start experimenting with programming instead of worrying about being labelled a geek and then you'll start to see some real progress. Get toy stores to have electronic toys that aren't always in the boys section. Just don't expect the business world to fix a cultural problem that it didn't create and can't fix.
- ramblerman 9y ago
  > Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation Gender equality is a good thing. I'm not sure why the assumption is that this means perfect parity across every industry.
- lj3 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago

19eightyfour 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
rimliu 9y ago
I you sure it is no real representation? Last I checked male leads outnumbered females in real world too.
- 19eightyfour 9y ago
  There's that right. But not all stories are about the corporate world or something like that. A lot of stories are about relationships or Adventures or fictional stories completely. In The stories of our lives, representation is mixed and balanced. So I don't think on-screen world does represent the real world... outside of extending say, inequality present in the corporate world, through narrative, to other Realms where it is not present or not as present. So I think that's a form of bias creation and misrepresentation that doesn't work to promote equality... Or reality. Secondly, movies are fictional worlds so they can represent whatever their creators choose them to represent. They could be representing more equally. They're not. To me the misrepresentation of reality and the bias representation of the fictional world in Hollywood movies is a really clear example of sexism. Just one example and I'm a huge sci-fi fan of the Alien series and Prometheus series. But I was shocked that in the trailer for the new Prometheus movie not only is pretty much everybody white but pretty much everyone he's a man. And I'm like come on it's the future surely the creators can imagine that things are going to be more equal.

ouid 9y ago

isn't this a hopelessly entangled measurement?

cperciva 9y ago

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 9y ago
Never heard of this study or it's debunking. I would owe you 2 TIL if you could provide some sources!
- forgottenpass 9y ago
  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...
  - melbourne7 9y ago
    that's GitHub, not Facebook
    - forgottenpass 9y ago
      Did you even read cperciva's comment upthread?
  - Iv 9y ago
    Thanks a lot!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mankash666 9y ago

Correlation!=causation.

thinkaboutit113 9y ago

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.

retrogradeorbit 9y ago

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 9y ago
Difficult to work on a project without knowing who your coworkers are...
- retrogradeorbit 9y ago
  I mean for the purpose of a study. Not for day to day coding.

diyseguy 9y ago

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.