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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

by deelowe 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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
kharms 10y ago
There were two studies, one that was unofficial (just an engineer looking at commits) that found the quoted result. It looked at gender adjusted by tenure. This study didn't have the resources to do that. Then there was a second cover-your-ass study by Facebook HR that found that if you adjust gender by seniority/rank the bias went away. This raised the question of why female engineers were at lower ranks after the same amount of time on staff. It might be explained by prior work experience, or starting rank, but it might not be. From the articles on this it looks like they (fb) don't actually want to answer this question.
013a 10y ago
I guarantee you that no one in Facebook feels comfortable suggesting that they investigate another possible (not likely, but possible) cause: the code is just worse, on average. And there could be many reasons for that, beyond just the simplistic "girls are bad at code." Maybe Facebook has a lower bar for hiring female engineers due to affirmative action.

by deelowe 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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

kharms 10y ago

There were two studies, one that was unofficial (just an engineer looking at commits) that found the quoted result. It looked at gender adjusted by tenure. This study didn't have the resources to do that. Then there was a second cover-your-ass study by Facebook HR that found that if you adjust gender by seniority/rank the bias went away. This raised the question of why female engineers were at lower ranks after the same amount of time on staff. It might be explained by prior work experience, or starting rank, but it might not be. From the articles on this it looks like they (fb) don't actually want to answer this question.

013a 10y ago

I guarantee you that no one in Facebook feels comfortable suggesting that they investigate another possible (not likely, but possible) cause: the code is just worse, on average. And there could be many reasons for that, beyond just the simplistic "girls are bad at code." Maybe Facebook has a lower bar for hiring female engineers due to affirmative action.