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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 int

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 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.
- geofft 10y ago
  Can you provide evidence for the specific claim that women, in particular, are statistically-significantly less strong at the software engineering industry, in particular? (I buy the argument that there are statistically-significant differences in some strengths that apply in some industries, yes. I'm curious to see how this applies to software engineering in particular.)
  - hyperdunc 10y ago
    I don't recall the exact source but I believe that overall, women score lower in tests for mathematical and logical aptitude, and higher in tests for verbal and social aptitude. This correlates with the low numbers of women that choose to enter the industry, despite increasing incentives. It also correlates with female domination of fields such as nursing.
    - geofft 10y ago
      OK. I'd argue that software engineering and especially senior software engineering (architecture, designing APIs and interfaces, reading and writing documentation, team management) is better correlated with verbal and social aptitude than with mathematical and logical aptitude. Being able to get a tricky sorting algorithm right is the sort of thing a junior engineer is more likely to do than a senior engineer; when the senior engineer does it, they also tend to need to explain to others why the algorithm is right. Of course this is just my belief, as a member of the industry, and not a scientifically-researched conclusion. So, again, I'm curious to see evidence of why women's aptitude is poorly correlated with the specific industry of software engineering. (I would even buy, based on your argument, that women's aptitude is poorly correlated with academic computer science, but that's a very different field.)
      - hyperdunc 10y ago
        It's true communication skills are more important once the senior level is reached. Perhaps the work involved in moving through the junior ranks is not appealing. It's clear women on the whole are not drawn to STEM. It's not clear why but there does appear to be a biological component. It's certainly not primarily socially constructed. That's my observation anyway. I haven't studied the issue in great detail.
jcwayne 10y ago
No good dead goes unpunished. As long as Facebook continues to increase the percentage of women it hires, it will have a disproportionately high number of junior female engineers. Intentionally failing to control for that fact is great if you want to profit from the problem of under-representation of women in engineering roles, not so much if you actually want to solve the problem.
- geofft 10y ago
  > As long as Facebook continues to increase the percentage of women it hires, it will have a disproportionately high number of junior female engineers. I don't understand why this follows. The standard argument I hear for why women are under-represented (relative to the null hypothesis) is the "pipeline," that at various stages in the process women drop out and it is hard to retain them. In particular, there's the argument that women put their career on hold for their family, which implies that there's a significant number of under-employed senior women. I'd be very interested to see the number of years of experience vs. level assigned by Facebook, grouped by gender, which would answer whether Facebook's gender balance is really the result of a bunch of 0-years-experience hires. It seems very possible that causality here is the other way around: because women get their code rejected more often, therefore they do not get promoted as much.
- itsdrewmiller 10y ago
  The engineer-lead study did control for that fact. The company study used promotion level instead of seniority which one would probably expect to have similar bias impact as code review.
NaliSauce 10y ago
>the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be. Where does it need to be and why?
- geofft 10y ago
  It needs to match the proportion of qualified women to qualified men, because to do otherwise is to either fail to employ qualified people or to employ unqualified people, both of which are bad for Facebook as a company (and arguably for the world at large). I have not yet seen any concrete evidence to dispute the null hypothesis, that while gender is correlated with a great many things it is not correlated with the ability to be successful at Facebook. Therefore I accept the null hypothesis and think the right number is ~50%. I'm open to believing that the number should be different, possibly very different, given evidence.

Toenex 10y 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 10y 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 10y 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.

geofft 10y ago
Can you provide evidence for the specific claim that women, in particular, are statistically-significantly less strong at the software engineering industry, in particular? (I buy the argument that there are statistically-significant differences in some strengths that apply in some industries, yes. I'm curious to see how this applies to software engineering in particular.)
- hyperdunc 10y ago
  I don't recall the exact source but I believe that overall, women score lower in tests for mathematical and logical aptitude, and higher in tests for verbal and social aptitude. This correlates with the low numbers of women that choose to enter the industry, despite increasing incentives. It also correlates with female domination of fields such as nursing.
  - geofft 10y ago
    OK. I'd argue that software engineering and especially senior software engineering (architecture, designing APIs and interfaces, reading and writing documentation, team management) is better correlated with verbal and social aptitude than with mathematical and logical aptitude. Being able to get a tricky sorting algorithm right is the sort of thing a junior engineer is more likely to do than a senior engineer; when the senior engineer does it, they also tend to need to explain to others why the algorithm is right. Of course this is just my belief, as a member of the industry, and not a scientifically-researched conclusion. So, again, I'm curious to see evidence of why women's aptitude is poorly correlated with the specific industry of software engineering. (I would even buy, based on your argument, that women's aptitude is poorly correlated with academic computer science, but that's a very different field.)
    - hyperdunc 10y ago
      It's true communication skills are more important once the senior level is reached. Perhaps the work involved in moving through the junior ranks is not appealing. It's clear women on the whole are not drawn to STEM. It's not clear why but there does appear to be a biological component. It's certainly not primarily socially constructed. That's my observation anyway. I haven't studied the issue in great detail.

jcwayne 10y ago

No good dead goes unpunished. As long as Facebook continues to increase the percentage of women it hires, it will have a disproportionately high number of junior female engineers. Intentionally failing to control for that fact is great if you want to profit from the problem of under-representation of women in engineering roles, not so much if you actually want to solve the problem.

geofft 10y ago
> As long as Facebook continues to increase the percentage of women it hires, it will have a disproportionately high number of junior female engineers. I don't understand why this follows. The standard argument I hear for why women are under-represented (relative to the null hypothesis) is the "pipeline," that at various stages in the process women drop out and it is hard to retain them. In particular, there's the argument that women put their career on hold for their family, which implies that there's a significant number of under-employed senior women. I'd be very interested to see the number of years of experience vs. level assigned by Facebook, grouped by gender, which would answer whether Facebook's gender balance is really the result of a bunch of 0-years-experience hires. It seems very possible that causality here is the other way around: because women get their code rejected more often, therefore they do not get promoted as much.
itsdrewmiller 10y ago
The engineer-lead study did control for that fact. The company study used promotion level instead of seniority which one would probably expect to have similar bias impact as code review.

NaliSauce 10y ago

>the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be. Where does it need to be and why?

geofft 10y ago
It needs to match the proportion of qualified women to qualified men, because to do otherwise is to either fail to employ qualified people or to employ unqualified people, both of which are bad for Facebook as a company (and arguably for the world at large). I have not yet seen any concrete evidence to dispute the null hypothesis, that while gender is correlated with a great many things it is not correlated with the ability to be successful at Facebook. Therefore I accept the null hypothesis and think the right number is ~50%. I'm open to believing that the number should be different, possibly very different, given evidence.