9 ms·

Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims

65 points by mgiannopoulos 9y ago

LeeHwang 9y ago
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.
jlebrech 9y ago
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
- smt88 9y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - jlebrech 9y ago
    check leshow's reply
  - jlebrech 9y ago
    as leshow deleted their comment (edit: I can see it again) i'll explain: * facebook got criticism for not hiring enough women as coders. * facebook hired more women (probably lots of junior coders) * they do what junior coders do * someone turned the code review rejections into a spreadsheet and disregarded seniority (experience mainly), and made the issue about gender.
    - smt88 9y ago
      What about studies of GitHub showing that pull requests are rejected more often when the contributor is known to be female? Or, to put it another way: when contributors are anonymous and genderless, work by women is accepted at the same rate as men?
      - nathanasmith 9y ago
        The Github results were based on the assumed gender of submitters based on things like having female anime character avatars and "female sounding" usernames. I would posit that methodology as highly flawed.
        jlebrech 9y ago
        are what is 'code', maybe they were just textual changes (eg adding a contributor covenant)
- ch4s3 9y ago
  Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?
  - ybrah 9y ago
    Women are more likely to get hired to solve the unequal distribution of female/male engineers. This makes it more likely to have less qualified female engineers, and more qualified male engineers, since hiring requirements for men are more strict. A higher average of under qualified females compared to under qualified male engineers will lead to more code getting reject from the female counterpart.
    - accountyaccount 9y ago
      This is also a biased assumption that women are worse developers... seems a little quick to jump to that conclusion.
      - Sacho 9y ago
        Not necessarily. If the pool of talent is exactly the same(let's say 1000 women and 1000 men) and your interviewing process is perfect at determining engineer quality, but you are hiring 80 women and 20 men, then you'll hire the top 2% of men and the top 8% of women. Again, just assuming that the talent is exactly the same, the women you've hired will still be worse. In reality, the pool of female talent is very shallow. Again assuming the talent levels are exactly the same, there's just not enough highly-skilled women to go around, e.g. if you're trying to hire the top 1% of engineers, and you have a pool of 1 million men and 100,000 women, then you're looking at 10000 men and 1000 women as your potential hires. If the top 1000 women are already taken, then you're forced to relax your interview requirements for women. In fact, if the pool is completely free for your usage, but you're looking to hire 10000 men and 10000 women, you'll be hiring the top 1% of male talent and down to the top 10% of female talent, which should lead to a difference in output. This doesn't mean that "sexism" isn't real or that it's not a problem women face in the workplace. The question however, is how to measure the effectiveness of "anti-sexism" practices employed, if you cannot measure the effect of "sexism" itself, as it is entangled with all the other, confounding factors. You can't optimize performance if you can't measure the effects your solutions have on it.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  I'm interested in how the Cobra Effect applies to an analysis.
- scandox 9y ago
  > Historian Michael Vann argues that the cobra example from British India cannot be proven, but that the rats in Vietnam case can be proven, so the term could be changed to the "rat effect". This guy won't win any prizes for marketing.
deelowe 9y ago
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)?
- martin1b 9y ago
  Exactly. Maybe the code needed to be rejected. Many developers have no problem pointing out issues in code. Anyone's code. You can see it daily on stackoverflow. Just because it happens to be a female from time to time makes it newsworthy.
  - accountyaccount 9y ago
    It means it's worth looking into... which is what they're doing. They also discovered the code is more often from more junior developers, which leads to an investigation of whether or not women are having a harder time being promoted or are leaving the company more often.
- oneplusone 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
    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
BugsJustFindMe 9y ago
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.
- Toenex 9y ago
  > the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be. So is the story really that the n is too small for this story?
  - striking 9y ago
    No, the issue with the article is that its author didn't take into account (as someone claiming to be from Facebook said in a different thread) "skill level" when making their comparisons. (This claim aligns with the statement in the blockquote at the bottom of the article.) Maybe on average women get less code into the code base, but it's unfair to everyone if you don't remove the influence that seniority has on your dataset before pointing at gender. Women face many problems in this industry as it is. If I could, I'd ask The Verge not to make up any new ones.
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  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.
savanaly 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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.
- itsdrewmiller 9y ago
  The study that found the 35% controlled for seniority (at Facebook). It would be most correct to use overall experience including prior to FB, but it is probably less correct to use promotion level when promotion decisions would very likely suffer from the same biases. https://www.google.com/amp/www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/02/facebooks-female-engineers-claim-gender-bias.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017...
randomact2452 9y ago
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.
- jlebrech 9y ago
  it's sad that you have to create a throwaway to have a genuine opinion here.
  - ReverseCold 9y ago
    He works at Facebook and is stating it as a fact.
    - justin66 9y ago
      He's a random, anonymous person who says he works at Facebook. Unless you're vouching for him?
  - tremon 9y ago
    I think that's not related to "here". It's more likely that that is because they've "taken part of this internal discussion at Facebook".
- jjawssd 9y ago
  Why is your username green?
  - anothercomment 9y ago
    Because it is new (throwaway). HN colors new accounts green.
  - scandox 9y ago
    Because new accounts are green and his account is a throwaway account which he just created for the purpose of making this single comment.
zobzu 9y ago
these articles are sensationalist garbage and just do a disservice to anyone having actual injustice
- 0xfab1 9y ago
  That's why I usually open HN comment section first. I try not to give my precious clicks to this kind of articles.
- Dirlewanger 9y ago
  All Vox Media brands are smug and toxic liberal rags. Best to avoid them entirely.
anothercomment 9y ago
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.
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
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?)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- panzer_wyrm 9y ago
  https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surgeons-23b0e2cf6d52 https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surg... Taleb - Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    That's it, thanks!
- thwarted 9y ago
  So is "dress for the job you want" still worth heeding or not?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sova 9y ago
Just embarrassingly stupid. The playing field is not at all equal yet, and until then a meaningful comparison will not take place. /2c
yomly 9y ago
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.
pvnick 9y ago
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.
kordless 9y ago
This is not a throwaway account. Anyone can look at both my comment history and profile to determine identity. You, on the other hand, represent yourself under the guise of anonymity, yet with purported knowledge of Facebook internal processes and discussions. The ramification is that, we as a group, must now take the irrationality of "your" identity and match it up with a rational "truth" presented which is "the level of rejection between genders is the same" (at Facebook). The act of anonymity is likely rationalized as required to avoid judgement. Alternately, the act may be rationalized as an act by the company to avoid judgement, which means you aren't you, but someone posting on behalf of the company. Third, you may be an irrational actor who is posting this to troll us, which is to say an irrational desire to spread irrationality further into our group. In all cases, this comment is highly irrational. If it's a troll, it's an objective of the troll to seek to spread further irrationality (additional unknown work). If it's a real human, who works at Facebook, posting this information is irrational because we have no way of knowing the context of the conversation, i.e. why did such a topic come up to begin with, who discussed it, who wrote the tests for it, and who conducted and analyzed the test results? Third and finally, if it is the company itself posting it, why is the company posting it? From an irrational standpoint, keeping this information "unofficial" makes it more likely to spread as a "truth" coming from the company, which means they are acting more like a troll with a purpose. (Which is not to say all trolls do not have purpose.) If the company was ever to make this a public statement, I'm sure more work, or irrationality would come of it, given the questions I raise above about whether testing for this is done in a logical and fair manner. Side note: I don't believe we should allow anonymous accounts to post because of the work required to untangle the logic. This is currently not possible to do with the HN software, so it's a moot point, and remains a source of dissonance for us. Edit: Hello Facebook. Streisand effect, anyone? Getting about 1 negative downvote every 2 minutes. Fascinating.
- sctb 9y ago
  Please don't go off like this here. Throwaway accounts are standard and Hacker News users are perfectly capable of incorporating that datum into their interpretation. We detached this thread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14255769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14255769 and marked it off-topic.
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.
Fragoel2 9y ago
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
itsdrewmiller 9y ago
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.
dlwdlw 9y ago
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)

65 points by mgiannopoulos 9y ago

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.

jlebrech 9y ago

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

smt88 9y ago
Can you elaborate?
- jlebrech 9y ago
  check leshow's reply
- jlebrech 9y ago
  as leshow deleted their comment (edit: I can see it again) i'll explain: * facebook got criticism for not hiring enough women as coders. * facebook hired more women (probably lots of junior coders) * they do what junior coders do * someone turned the code review rejections into a spreadsheet and disregarded seniority (experience mainly), and made the issue about gender.
  - smt88 9y ago
    What about studies of GitHub showing that pull requests are rejected more often when the contributor is known to be female? Or, to put it another way: when contributors are anonymous and genderless, work by women is accepted at the same rate as men?
    - nathanasmith 9y ago
      The Github results were based on the assumed gender of submitters based on things like having female anime character avatars and "female sounding" usernames. I would posit that methodology as highly flawed.
      - jlebrech 9y ago
        are what is 'code', maybe they were just textual changes (eg adding a contributor covenant)
ch4s3 9y ago
Care to elaborate on how the cobra effect relates here?
- ybrah 9y ago
  Women are more likely to get hired to solve the unequal distribution of female/male engineers. This makes it more likely to have less qualified female engineers, and more qualified male engineers, since hiring requirements for men are more strict. A higher average of under qualified females compared to under qualified male engineers will lead to more code getting reject from the female counterpart.
  - accountyaccount 9y ago
    This is also a biased assumption that women are worse developers... seems a little quick to jump to that conclusion.
    - Sacho 9y ago
      Not necessarily. If the pool of talent is exactly the same(let's say 1000 women and 1000 men) and your interviewing process is perfect at determining engineer quality, but you are hiring 80 women and 20 men, then you'll hire the top 2% of men and the top 8% of women. Again, just assuming that the talent is exactly the same, the women you've hired will still be worse. In reality, the pool of female talent is very shallow. Again assuming the talent levels are exactly the same, there's just not enough highly-skilled women to go around, e.g. if you're trying to hire the top 1% of engineers, and you have a pool of 1 million men and 100,000 women, then you're looking at 10000 men and 1000 women as your potential hires. If the top 1000 women are already taken, then you're forced to relax your interview requirements for women. In fact, if the pool is completely free for your usage, but you're looking to hire 10000 men and 10000 women, you'll be hiring the top 1% of male talent and down to the top 10% of female talent, which should lead to a difference in output. This doesn't mean that "sexism" isn't real or that it's not a problem women face in the workplace. The question however, is how to measure the effectiveness of "anti-sexism" practices employed, if you cannot measure the effect of "sexism" itself, as it is entangled with all the other, confounding factors. You can't optimize performance if you can't measure the effects your solutions have on it.
FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
I'm interested in how the Cobra Effect applies to an analysis.
scandox 9y ago
> Historian Michael Vann argues that the cobra example from British India cannot be proven, but that the rats in Vietnam case can be proven, so the term could be changed to the "rat effect". This guy won't win any prizes for marketing.

deelowe 9y ago

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)?

martin1b 9y ago
Exactly. Maybe the code needed to be rejected. Many developers have no problem pointing out issues in code. Anyone's code. You can see it daily on stackoverflow. Just because it happens to be a female from time to time makes it newsworthy.
- accountyaccount 9y ago
  It means it's worth looking into... which is what they're doing. They also discovered the code is more often from more junior developers, which leads to an investigation of whether or not women are having a harder time being promoted or are leaving the company more often.
oneplusone 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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

BugsJustFindMe 9y ago

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.

Toenex 9y ago
> the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be. So is the story really that the n is too small for this story?
- striking 9y ago
  No, the issue with the article is that its author didn't take into account (as someone claiming to be from Facebook said in a different thread) "skill level" when making their comparisons. (This claim aligns with the statement in the blockquote at the bottom of the article.) Maybe on average women get less code into the code base, but it's unfair to everyone if you don't remove the influence that seniority has on your dataset before pointing at gender. Women face many problems in this industry as it is. If I could, I'd ask The Verge not to make up any new ones.
hyperdunc 9y ago
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.

savanaly 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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.
itsdrewmiller 9y ago
The study that found the 35% controlled for seniority (at Facebook). It would be most correct to use overall experience including prior to FB, but it is probably less correct to use promotion level when promotion decisions would very likely suffer from the same biases. https://www.google.com/amp/www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/02/facebooks-female-engineers-claim-gender-bias.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017...

randomact2452 9y ago

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.

jlebrech 9y ago
it's sad that you have to create a throwaway to have a genuine opinion here.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  He works at Facebook and is stating it as a fact.
  - justin66 9y ago
    He's a random, anonymous person who says he works at Facebook. Unless you're vouching for him?
- tremon 9y ago
  I think that's not related to "here". It's more likely that that is because they've "taken part of this internal discussion at Facebook".
jjawssd 9y ago
Why is your username green?
- anothercomment 9y ago
  Because it is new (throwaway). HN colors new accounts green.
- scandox 9y ago
  Because new accounts are green and his account is a throwaway account which he just created for the purpose of making this single comment.

zobzu 9y ago

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

0xfab1 9y ago
That's why I usually open HN comment section first. I try not to give my precious clicks to this kind of articles.
Dirlewanger 9y ago
All Vox Media brands are smug and toxic liberal rags. Best to avoid them entirely.

anothercomment 9y ago

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.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago

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?)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
panzer_wyrm 9y ago
https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surgeons-23b0e2cf6d52 https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surg... Taleb - Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  That's it, thanks!
thwarted 9y ago
So is "dress for the job you want" still worth heeding or not?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sova 9y ago

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

yomly 9y ago

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.

pvnick 9y ago

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.

kordless 9y ago

This is not a throwaway account. Anyone can look at both my comment history and profile to determine identity. You, on the other hand, represent yourself under the guise of anonymity, yet with purported knowledge of Facebook internal processes and discussions. The ramification is that, we as a group, must now take the irrationality of "your" identity and match it up with a rational "truth" presented which is "the level of rejection between genders is the same" (at Facebook). The act of anonymity is likely rationalized as required to avoid judgement. Alternately, the act may be rationalized as an act by the company to avoid judgement, which means you aren't you, but someone posting on behalf of the company. Third, you may be an irrational actor who is posting this to troll us, which is to say an irrational desire to spread irrationality further into our group. In all cases, this comment is highly irrational. If it's a troll, it's an objective of the troll to seek to spread further irrationality (additional unknown work). If it's a real human, who works at Facebook, posting this information is irrational because we have no way of knowing the context of the conversation, i.e. why did such a topic come up to begin with, who discussed it, who wrote the tests for it, and who conducted and analyzed the test results? Third and finally, if it is the company itself posting it, why is the company posting it? From an irrational standpoint, keeping this information "unofficial" makes it more likely to spread as a "truth" coming from the company, which means they are acting more like a troll with a purpose. (Which is not to say all trolls do not have purpose.) If the company was ever to make this a public statement, I'm sure more work, or irrationality would come of it, given the questions I raise above about whether testing for this is done in a logical and fair manner. Side note: I don't believe we should allow anonymous accounts to post because of the work required to untangle the logic. This is currently not possible to do with the HN software, so it's a moot point, and remains a source of dissonance for us. Edit: Hello Facebook. Streisand effect, anyone? Getting about 1 negative downvote every 2 minutes. Fascinating.

sctb 9y ago
Please don't go off like this here. Throwaway accounts are standard and Hacker News users are perfectly capable of incorporating that datum into their interpretation. We detached this thread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14255769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14255769 and marked it off-topic.

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.

Fragoel2 9y ago

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

itsdrewmiller 9y ago

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.

dlwdlw 9y ago

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)