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

<i>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.</i><p>That study has been so thoroughly debunked at this point that I&#x27;m inclined to assume bad faith on the part of any journalist who cites it.

&gt; 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.<p>&gt; 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.<p>This is a case of damned if you do damned if you don&#x27;t. If they try to artificially increase gender diversity then this is an expected outcome.<p>So now we&#x27;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?

Reposting my comment from the other thread here.<p>Throwaway for obvious reasons.<p>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.<p>Here&#x27;s the problems that I faced:<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t promoted and the hardest part? Being told that I work like a senior engineer and if I do more work, I&#x27;ll get the promotion next year.<p>3. Being classified as the &#x27;diversity quota&#x27; - 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&#x27;s image alone, sucks. Imposter syndrome is real and these opinions contribute to it more.<p>I took up engineering to solve hard problems. It is sad that the culture of a company&#x2F;valley contributed to me contemplating want to quit engineering to do something where I&#x27;ll be treated right.<p>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&#x27;s in place. I&#x27;ve received so much help from women-focused diversity programs and have even helped fix a problem or two along the way.<p>Finally, on a funny end note, I&#x27;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&#x2F;product&#x2F;post is fairly common here. This post is hopefully taken in the same manner and not a female-ranting-about-things comment.

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.

I&#x27;ve seen this before. I&#x27;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&#x27;t necessarily write better code, often it is worse.<p>I think this could be improved by a system of code review anonymization that sends code reviews out - company wide - without identifying author info.

Correlation!=causation.

isn&#x27;t this a hopelessly entangled measurement?

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?<p>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.<p>So the representation of women on screen is not equal to the representation of women in real life. But it could be. And it&#x27;s not even equal to an ideal representation of women based on equality. But it could be. Because it&#x27;s a movie you can make it however you want to make it.