Facebook Rejects Female Engineers' Code More Often Than Male Counterparts, Analysis Finds (theverge.com) 450
According to The Wall Street Journal, female engineers who work at Facebook may face gender bias that prevents their code from being accepted at the same rate as male counterparts. "For Facebook, these revelations call into question the company's ongoing diversity efforts and its goal to build overarching online systems for people around the globe," reports The Verge. "The company's workforce is just 33 percent female, with women holding just 17 percent of technical roles and 27 percent of leadership positions." From the report: The findings come in two parts. An initial study by a former employee found that code written by female engineers was less likely to make it through Facebook's internal peer review system. This seemed to suggest that a female engineer's work was more heavily scrutinized. 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. Either possibility could result in the 35 percent higher code rejection rate for female engineers. When contacted by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook called the initial study "incomplete and inaccurate" and based on "incomplete data," but did not shy away from confirming Parikh's separate findings.
Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
"Facebook Rejects Female Engineers' Code More Often Than Male Counterparts, Analysis Finds"
Maybe it's just not as good, unless every female programmer signs it with "Coded by a Female Programmer!" That, and the little hearts above every lower-case "i".
Maybe here's the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Bias and discrimination exist.
What also exists is people who do shitty work.
Unfortunately, in the world of the feminist SJW, only white males are capable of doing shitty work. In the alternate universe of the feminist SJW, women and minorities are incapable of doing shitty work, and to claim any differently makes you a racist, sexist misogynist pig .
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Maybe here's the real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You're making the common mistake of conflating real Feminists with the man-hating, power-seeking, vengeance-driven SJW ersatz, who don't want equality, they want supremacy. Real Feminists just want to be treated fairly.
That's the only right kind of feminist is the first type these days. Otherwise you're excommunicated, and viciously attacked by them as a women hater. The same garbage that you see in subs like /r/feminism is the same type of stuff that's pushed in schools from Canada and the US to Australia. Everything is men's fault, it's all the fault of the patriarchy, society is ruled by the patriarchy, etc, etc, etc. If you refuse to believe that you're a misogynist/sexist/etc. It's this same type of bullshit that's given birth to MRA's, Men's Rights Movements, MGTOW, and so on. There's an absolute fear of standing up to them as well, because they'll bring out the "you're a rapist, you commit sexual assault, etc" garbage and will attempt to ruin a persons life to boot. And if you refuse to fall in line with that? Or if you refuse to follow the 3/4 women will be raped/sexually assaulted/etc? Well you're a rape apologist now.
Ask those 2nd wave feminists who've been saying the 3rd/4th wave bullshit is literal bullshit for decades now. Take someone like Camille Paglia or C.H. Sommers, they're "not real feminists" according to the modern orthodoxy. Or ask those women who say they're not feminists, and are viciously attacked by those batshit insane feminists, the media, and so on. The current brand of feminism can fall into one of two categories depending on your view. It's either a religion, or a cult.
Hell take all those feminists who say "well if men want help on their own issues, they should make their own movement." And so they did...you guess what happens? They're attacked, their meetings are disrupted, and so on. Ask yourself why those same feminists who say "it's about equality" attack men who've been raped by women. Try to get men's shelters shut down. Try to block successfully in many cases to get rape laws changed so they're gender neutral. Ask yourself why feminists have their panties in such a twist [telegraph.co.uk] over the documentary "The Red Pill" by Cassie Jaye. That they go as far as to attack her in the media and lie. Lie and threaten theaters who were showing it, force them to not show it. Say it's all rape apology, sexism, and so on. Disrupt private events from showing it. Ask yourself why feminists fight so hard against getting male suicide labeled an epidemic. It is. 80% in some countries are men, but the help they're able to get is close to non-existent in some cases. 83% of suicides in my own backyard are from men in the 16-40 range. There's two programs that exist to help men, there are 73 programs for women.
Then ask yourself, why so few people actually call themselves feminists. And why so many people see what the GP said, is believed by so many.
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Eek. Good thing I can change my gender at will - it's my superpower. I'm GenderFluidXe!!!!!1Eleven
Now if they threatened to change my sex, that might hurt.
Its because of the diversity efforts (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook has a manadate to hire more Female Engineers. As far fewer Female Engineers graduate than other Engineers one way to get the Quantity desired is to lower the Quality. Once you are letting in lesser Quality Engineers and then vetting their checkins at the existing standards its expected that more of the checkins will be rejected.
I just hope code review standards are not lowered in order to avoid emotional trauma.
What's next? 50% of surgeries have to be done by female surgeons?
The President needs to be Female 50% of the time?
50% of combat casualties need to be female?
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I just hope code review standards are not lowered in order to avoid emotional trauma
On the other hand, I'm sure you'd agree that raising the standards for men until the reject rate is equal for both genders will result in even better code quality overall right? See... we can frame it either way.
The more important issue is whether the review standards are currently being applied equally or not. They should be.
It -might- be that the pool of women isn't as good at coding as the pool of men... especially if they have been 'stuffing' the ranks with diversity hires. In which case the best soluti
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Now factor out the failure rate of retaining lower quality programmers to maintain gender numbers ie people who would normally be let go and then you get more code check in failures. Think more bad male coders fired and no bad female coders fired to maintain gender numbers and code rejection numbers blow out big over time. Not that bad coders were retained long term, just likely that bad coders where given much much longer trial periods based upon a gender bias.
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On the fighter pilots I read that during WW2 the Russians put a lot of women into Cockpits and Artillery regiments. The reasons were that Nazi troops were using rape as a weapon so they did not want to put women on the frontline on the ground where they could be captured and raped(pilots were not expected to survive being shot down so less chance of getting raped). Apparently many women are OK risking their lives but not risking getting raped for their country. Once they started doing that they realized wom
Re:Its because of the diversity efforts (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Its because of the diversity efforts (Score:4, Informative)
Nursing is a low paying job? You must live in a shit country. The average nurse makes $33/hr here in Canada. The only other job I can think of here where I could make that is where I'm risking my life in the oil patch, in a mine. Or have 20+ years experience in IT, or am in a specialized field.
Exceptions don't make the rule (Score:5, Insightful)
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Have to concur here. Maybe, just maybe, the women hired by Facebook as coders just can't code as well as the men. 33% female workforce in a male dominant industry is actually a lot. So maybe some of the women were hired just to add to the diversity roles instead of actually being good programmers.
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly how does a code reviewer know the sex of the code submitter, which would be a prerequisite to any claim of bias? I'd guess the only way would be a real name was attached to the submission. But why should that be the case? Why not anonymize submissions? If it's felt there is a need for reviewers to know the past quality of submissions for a each submitter (but why, isn't the review supposed to judge the current submission?), have the system show a quality metric (% of submissions accepted?).
Is there any real need for submitters to be personally identifiable to others, besides perhaps via a back-end system only available to management?
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Have you ever programmed in a professional environment? Have you never used source control? The name is attached because that's important metadata for any changes to the code.
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You don't need to know that during a code review, though.
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Back when having women in orchestras was rare, there was a similar belief as to why they weren't given jobs after auditioning. "Maybe they're just not as good as their male counterparts." or, "Women probably just don't have the strength to (blow a trumpet, hold a cello, play percussion)". You would hear, "It takes a lot of stamina and commitment to be a great musician, and women just don't have it."
That was the prevalent belief in the professional music world until orchestras st
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
So maybe instead of going public about how Facebook is biased against women they should instead get them to start doing blind submissions, and only go public about it if they refuse or the data holds true.
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Back when having women in orchestras was rare, there was a similar belief as to why they weren't given jobs after auditioning. "Maybe they're just not as good as their male counterparts." or, "Women probably just don't have the strength to (blow a trumpet, hold a cello, play percussion)". You would hear, "It takes a lot of stamina and commitment to be a great musician, and women just don't have it."
That was the prevalent belief in the professional music world until orchestras started holding blind auditions. Now women make up more than 50% of professional orchestras.
Occams razor applies. Rather than invent an elaborate reason for why the code is getting rejected, the simplest explanation encompassing all facts is that the code is crap.
Maybe... just *maybe*... the simpler "diversity hires didn't work out too well" explains the situation better than "patriarchy conspiracy theory"
Remember that each "diversity hire" replaced someone who would have been hired solely on merit. It's not unreasonable to expect this outcome, and yes it was even predicted multiple times, on /.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Funny)
A: This code works, let's add it to the proj... ... It's... *pant* a vagina
B: WAIT WAIT WAIT, did you check the genitals?
A: Not yet
B: *disapproving look*
A: Okay, give me a minute *runs off*
[10 minutes later]
A: *pant pant*
B: *right click, delete*
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, did you just discriminate against women without vaginas [nationalreview.com]? You bigot!
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Maybe it's just not as good...
This is the most obvious and likely correct reason: in order to get a 17% female tech workforce, facebook must be scouring the earth to find females to hire in the name of gender diversity, because universities just don't graduate a high proportion of female CS majors. And that is because female's aren't choosing careers in that area.
When you are hiring people just because of their gender, this means that people who are manifestly inadequate to the task at hand will get their code rejected more often.
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How convenient. We can just dismiss concerns of bias now by offering an alternate hypotheis, and no need for proof.
No we can establish the original hypothesis hasn't been shown to be established with any reasonable certainly by simply pointing out a plausible alternate hypothesis that the original claims didn't explore.
It's normal in good science papers to run through all the alternatives and provide data to refute them, or point out that that some alteranitive hypothesis might be true.
Bias, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have zero problem accepting that possibility.
However, I find it absurd that some people have trouble accepting the possibility that inasmuch as women do approach things differently than males do in the general case, that this might very well affect the solutions they come up with, again, in the general case.
The first sign that political correctness has gone too far is when you see adherents ignoring facts right in front of their nose.
For all I know, the women's solutions are better because of this, and the stats brought to light here are because men can't see that - because the thinking isn't the same.
But to assume that the sexes produce identical results when presented with identical problems... that actually seems more suspect to me than any claim of inherent equality.
Best tech support person ever worked for me - over thirty years - was female. By far. Because she, naturally I believe, brought compassion to the phone and she knew what she was doing right down to the last nut and bolt.
Equality of opportunity is a wonderful idea, and I'm all for it. And for reaping the results of the best outcome.
But presuming equality of capability because tits vs. danglies... that's just stupid. No one should do that. And you know what that is? It's bias.
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The first sign that political correctness has gone too far is when you see adherents ignoring facts right in front of their nose.
You realize the term political correctness is from a 1957 speech by Mao
Aka how to handle reality contradicting communism. So that first sign was there from the first use. It has always been about getting peop
Re:Bias, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
For all I know, the women's solutions are better because of this, and the stats brought to light here are because men can't see that - because the thinking isn't the same.
Real life example of this happening: Female police officers.
For many years the most important criteria for evaluating a police officer was "number of arrests". Women just didn't measure up, and performed poorly.
Then "community policing" was adopted, and people realized that "making arrests" was actually a dumb way to measure police performance. Far more important was preventing the crimes from happening in the first place, and defusing potentially violent situations rather than escalating them. By these measures, women are, on average, better police officers than men.
Re: Bias, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
People have known for a long time that pure numbers is a shit way to measure performance. But the police also know that when they want a budget increase, the general population is more willing to grant one when they have hard numbers to show.
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[citation needed]
Re:Bias, eh? (Score:4, Informative)
[citation needed]
This is pretty well known for anyone who's been in training, or knows someone who was a cop prior to say 1980. Used to be performance was weighted based on the number of arrests/investigations/etc. Community Oriented Policing(COP) [wikipedia.org] changed all that in say 1982-84ish when a lot of police forces went to police services. Policing in the US is still holds a military structure, and works in a pyramid type fashion, the guy at the top is the most important and the way a police force works and solves problems is dictated through the chain of command. Nearly all policing in the west(inc. Japan) however now works on an inverse pyramid. Meaning the guy at the bottom has wide leeway to determine the right way to deal with a problem and "how" that problem should be solved. COP changed the way policing was done from that metric to "how" a problem was solved based on what the individual did to solve it. There are still some parts of policing that are weighted on tickets/arrests/etc. Traffic police in many places performance is weighted on tickets for example, but even that's falling to the wayside.
The US in and of itself is still probably ~10-15 years out from the shift to a full-on COP style of policing. It's a better system by far and is much more like the early days(1880-1950) of policing where you have people who work the same areas day-in and day out, know the people, live in the same area, hiring is based on people who live there, etc. The 1950-1980ish era pushed the "roving police" idea, where the idea of driving around and never talking with people was a great(really terrible) idea.
Bingo (Score:3)
Women are generally less confrontation and can defuse a situation with out it seeming to become a pissing contest. I can attest to this from personal experience. In a few situations some good 'ol boys just won't accept any authority from a women but that is rare. For many years the best criteria for becoming a police officer was to be big and intimidating, now education and common sense are high on that list. My only objection to hiring women as cops and fire people rests on the fact of being physically abl
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be interesting to study the patterns of the differences. There could indeed be a "style mismatch" between the way females tend to code versus males. Everyone has their personal preferences and as a reviewer, if a specimen doesn't match close enough to their preferences, they are more likely to reject it.
Anyhow, the devil's in the details, and we don't have those. Factors to be checked include things like duration at
Re: Maybe (Score:5, Informative)
Just because their are fewer of a particular gender in an institution does not automatically translate to Gender Bias. There could be many reasons. After all noone ever accuses maternity wards of discriminating against men even though 100% of their clientele are female.
Females mature much faster than males. By the time they get introduced to tech in schools nowadays they are already entering puberty and distracted by hormones. The key to get more women into tech is start introducing programming in elementary school and hook them on coding before they get sidetracked with stupid tween shit.
Though one must ask the question - "Why is a society's priority to get more women into tech?" We dont see articles on how to get more men into nursing, teaching or rhythmic Gymnastics. People choose what interests them and social biases play a part in what interests them but unless someone is actually getting harmed by the choice why should Society spend resources balancing the trend? After all not all trends will ever be balanced.
Re: Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
The key to get more women into tech is start introducing programming in elementary school and hook them on coding before they get sidetracked with stupid tween shit.
Nope. As someone who coaches a programming/robotics program at an elementary school for 4th, 5th and 6th graders, I can say that it is very difficult to get girls interested even in elementary school. The few that participate are mostly there because their parents forced them.
I have tried hard to get more girls to sign up. I recruited a techno-mom to be an assistant coach and role model. We let them form an all-girl team (which they prefer). We tried cooperation oriented programming tasks, rather than competitions. We tried other girl-oriented stuff like 3D-printing dollhouse furniture. None of that made a difference. Half of them quit when there was a time conflict with the school play rehearsals. Zero boys have dropped out.
I feel very frustrated. If anyone has any ideas on how to get girls interested in tech, I would love to hear about it.
Re: Maybe (Score:5, Funny)
If anyone has any ideas on how to get girls interested in tech, I would love to hear about it.
Get Justin Bieber to teach a PHP class?
Re: Maybe (Score:2, Insightful)
Stop assuming that girls being interested in tech looks the same as boys being interested in tech. People can be interested and still feel like they want to try other things. Did you try to recruit them for another tech activity when the play was over? Or were you assuming that "interested in tech" means "not interested in other things" and "always puts tech first", and therefore that since they put the play first when it had a deadline, they weren't interested in tech? And what about the social milieu?
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Re: Maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
A few years ago my nieces were really interested in this: http://web.stanford.edu/class/... [stanford.edu]
We did the image exercises. I started off doing most of the typing with their input, then they did some on their own. The cool thing with this library is you can go way off on a tangent. We made stripes of across some of the images for instance.
For what it's worth, my wife participated in an outreach program through her work to expose kids to programming. They sent a team to a school and each employee took a group of kids and did a different project. I suggested this one, which my wife customized a bit. It was by far the most popular project with the kids (I think they were 6th and 7th graders). Graphics are cool, especially the green-screen exercises.
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It's very hard because even at that age the bias is well established in their minds. But don't expect instant results either, just keep working at it and let the younger girls see the results (like that doll house) so that their expectations are redefined.
That's what happened with women's soccer in the UK, and it took a decade but it is quite well established now.
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In other words, you are frustrated because you can't force girls to like what you like? Authoritarian much?
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For the role models try medical doctors, veterinarians, lawyers who help animals and biologists. How a charity online does things that help animals.
The problem is hollywood and authors have projected what "programming tasks" are. Someone gets give a task and its done by an expert.
The result is then useful for the real task. The "programming task" is of no interest as smart pe
Re: Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm can't help you, but I'm just as frustrated.
My 12 years old niece loves, loves, Kerbal Space Program and plays it constantly. I introduced it to her when it first came out in 2015, when she was 10, and she's been having fun launching rockets, failing, redesigning, and trying again - she loves it. But she is absolutely terrified of her friends finding out, so much so that she'll play dumb about the game whenever her friends are around and a family member happens to mention it. I can't stress enough how scared she is for her friends to find out she likes a game about rocket science.
When I ask her why she says, pretty plainly, "Girls aren't supposed to be smart, no one likes smart girls - please don't tell anyone I like this game, I don't want people thinking I'm smart because then I won't have any friends!" She's 12! She's deliberately going out of her way to hinder herself and limit her choices in life because society has browbeat into her that she's not supposed to be smart or take an interest in science. The Ontario Science Centre is one of her favourite places to go, she begs me to take her whenever I can - and she totally gets the science, especially the Astronomy section, and could even be a scientist someday if she really wanted to - but she never tells her friends that she loves going there lest they think she's "smart" and shun her.
I've been trying to convince her otherwise, but it just doesn't work - peer pressure when you're a child is a horrific thing, it really messes you up - she's been telling me that girls aren't supposed to be smart for years now - and I think as adults many of us forget just how important social acceptance is to kids - how important it was to us when we were kids - and how that shapes one's perceptions far into the future.
Re: Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
>I feel very frustrated. If anyone has any ideas on how to get girls interested in tech, I would love to hear about it.
Ever consider that most girls don't enjoy being forced to think in linear, sequential, logical terms? Most girls don't want to drive fast motorcycles either. Most girls don't want to fight in bare knuckle boxing fights. We sure love forgetting biology and hell... girls and woman's own desires about what they want. If a girl picks nursing (or "play rehearsals") over IT, is she a "failure" or merely choosing the most rewarding job for her brain? Have you considered the only girls that enter coding are ones trying to please an authority figure (you, their parents, or some other societal pressure), and when that fails to continually reward them they go do what they actually want?
The true fact of the matter is, IT is a very financially successful field and that we want whats best for our girls (not equality, but the BEST) is the only reason we're trying to shoehorn them into IT. If we truly wanted "equality" of jobs, we'd be trying just as hard to force them to be plumbers, custodians, and other "bottom of the social ladder" jobs. But those jobs don't have social value, and we want our girls to be as valuable as possible.
We act like the world has magically gone "progressive" but all we're doing is the same thing we've been doing since pre-history, but calling it progressive. We're trying to make our girls the most valuable they can be, whether through corsets and exotic clothing to show the virtue of their virginity and social value, or simply getting them high paying jobs in IT and buying "princess" a nice car in highschool, the intent behind it is the same. And it's pretty damn obvious the same need doesn't exist for our boys.
So we either need to conclude that woman are incapable of driving themselves to become successful and NEED to be forced and pushed into being successful. Or, we're just a bunch of assholes pressuring girls into doing things they don't enjoy, just so they can alleviate our low view of them for being too "cliche" and enjoying feminine jobs.
It's alarming that these threads always end up like this. Denying women their agency, and/or treating them like morons. Nobody ever cares what women want, all they care about is, "there's not enough of them in this field."
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We dont see articles on how to get more men into nursing, teaching or rhythmic Gymnastics.
Do you know any teachers? It's the most common public employee profession and I can tell you that districts across the country are always looking for more MALE preK-4th grade teachers simply because it makes everyone's job easier. Not every student -- or their parents for that matter -- respond the same way to men as they do women (can you guess which gender spends more time in detention?) and having more males in the
Re: Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
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Slashdot is a tech site, so its not surprising we don't see many articles about diversity in these fields here. But if you look around and broaden your horizons, you'll find that there is a push to have a more equal workplace in those areas as well.
My neighbour when I younger was a male nurse, yes - a male nurse. He talked often about all the effort which was being taken to get more men into the profession, but in th
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>Why is a society's priority to get more women into tech?
Girls tell us they are interested but face barriers that boys don't. Some of us want to help them.
No, they don't. OTOH, lots of politically motivated girls are saying that *OTHER* girls are interested.
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>Why is a society's priority to get more women into tech?
Girls tell us they are interested but face barriers that boys don't. Some of us want to help them.
Why is no one bothered there aren't more women working in the sewers or on the bins or any other job that is mostly male but isn't glamorous or sexy? It's always just get more women in stem.
Re: Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Shittiest argument in the known world. If you intend to make a counterargument you too need evidence to assert your position it's that fucking simple, as you too are making a claim. This isn't a court of law, it's a peruvian cat training comment section. Furthermore the fact that the article explicitly states that there is a definitive correlation between the higher rejection rates and the immediate ranking in the hierarchy draws closer to the conclusion that the data is being misinterpreted and that junior employees are committing janky code. Delve even deeper into gender statistics and find that women with STEM degrees are in high demand with marginal supply, factor in diversity arbitrary diversity quotas. Now you've incentivized businesses to hire under-qualified people to handle products that are reviewed by peers; suddenly you have the outcome shown above.
So let's draw some conclusions: you hire people based on an arbitrary demand from the social strata in order to statistically balance your workforce and in doing so you create an amalgam of acceptable racism and sexism. In doing so you hire out all the people in the pool and you have to seek alternatives. These under-qualified alternatives fail to produce acceptable code and the senior employees reject it. The under-qualified people fail to promote, and are largely disinterested, overwhelmed, unwilling to learn or any of the many other reasons for continued failure, so they either quit, or continue to fail. Suddenly a statistically valid anomaly appears and men are to blame, rather than the incredibly sexist ideology that drives diversity quotas.
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Re: Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Token employees do token work, meow meow meow meow meow.
Explains perfectly why companies with more reputable hiring practices don't have the problem.
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. . . the claim was "Maybe it's just not as good." Needs proof as you and parent said.
A sentence that begins with "maybe" is not a "claim".
Hiring not by merit, but by Gender (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hiring not by merit, but by Gender (Score:5, Insightful)
It also equally likely that their diversity efforts have resulted in a lower overall experience level for their female engineers. Tech has always had a smaller proportion of women than the general population. If they all of a sudden said "let's hire lots of female engineers," and there are not as many experienced female engineers to poach from other tech companies, then you have to hire newbies and other less experienced folks and train them up.
Have you ever worked with a new or inexperienced engineer or programmer? They tend to write lots of crap code because they lack experience.
Of course, we don't know for sure because the word "experience" appears neither in the WSJ's article nor in The Verge's article. Gee that seems like the sort of basic thing that a study like this would consider.
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Of course, we don't know for sure because the word "experience" appears neither in the WSJ's article nor in The Verge's article. Gee that seems like the sort of basic thing that a study like this would consider.
depends on what dataset you're trying to use to put forward the statistical result that supports your narrative.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics (and all that jazz). Hell, if it really is an experience thing (likely given the article *does* mention that the rejections seem to align with rank of the coder, and women are at lower rank on average there) then by omitting that in your model means you don't even have to get outlandish with your p values. :p
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Yup. My current employer, while pushing hard for diversity, is doing pretty good at pushing to improve the company to attract said diversity, instead of just widening the net and bringing whatever they catch.
We have a pretty high ratio of female engineers (and even better ratio at the lead/director/vp level) for the kind of company we are. Not 50/50, but higher than the Google and Facebook of the world.
Pretty much all of the female engineers I've interacted with, including our junior ones, were top notch. H
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Or it could be a non-representative sample. Or the difference in rates might not be statistically significant. Or the sample used might be too heterogeneous in terms of content or subject to precisely compare rates. Or women could submit code more frequently and have the same acceptance rate. Or things might look different if you control for submission size.
It's nearly impossible to tell what's going on with a single aggregate figure like this without access to the underlying data, if not the code in que
First thought: "33%? Seriously?" (Score:5, Insightful)
I have worked in IT for many years and have known some truly stellar female programmers - but I've never worked anywhere with 33% women.
Based purely on industry statistics they had to bypass more experienced males in order to hire that ratio of females. There are just so many more males in the industry than females.
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then it's likely that the average talent of the women in Facebook would be lower than their male counterparts.
I don't think so. More likely is that Facebook *recently* started hiring lots of women, and did so including merit. The result would be a larger portion of junior programmers who are women than men which would likely result in the quality of code being lower not due to skill, but due to experience.
More (Score:5, Insightful)
Even worse, the women who weren't quota hires will never be sure if they earned their spot with their vagina or not.
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Even worse, the women who weren't quota hires will never be sure if they earned their spot with their vagina or not.
Well, at least some neck-beard got laid.
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Doubtful, unless these girls are nerds and clearly they aren't since they aren't very good at the programming. So, they hired some cool, hot chicks who date cool guy,s not nerds thus no neck-beard got laid as a result of the bad hire.
Cognitive Dissonance (Score:2, Funny)
Trying to balance the fact that their vagina doesn't/shouldn't matter while simultaneously trying to control the world with it.
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I fail to see how this is flamebait. Crude perhaps, but not flamebait.
It is a legitimate point. If you've made the decision to preferentially hire based on [trait], then that entire class of employee now is subject to the self doubt of "was I only hired because I had [trait] or am I good enough that I was hired because I am better than average?"
self doubt can be quite harmful.
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I think a few people interpreted it as a sex-for-job comment. Which is odd, because that doesn't usually leave much doubt in either direction.
Anecdote from an old workplace: (Score:3)
We were hiring a new engineer. A senior manager comes in all excited, my boss and I are sitting next to each other:
Senior: So tell me about this _____ applicant. Because she ticks most of the right boxes.
[she was asian and female]
My Boss: Oh did we mention she was a lesbian?
Senior: Really? [in a super excited voice]
Me and by boss dumbfounded: No, and if she were we wouldn't ask. We'll let you know who gets through to the next round on merit.
She was good, but it wasn't the right job for her unfortunately.
Happens in writing too (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem for many authors, not just coders, is that both women and men rank them more harshly.
No matter how you slice it.
I used to experiment with this by swapping names on code submissions with female colleagues and watching code suddenly be treated differently.
The cutting critiques were the worst parts.
Is it fair?
No.
Does it happen?
Yes.
My advice is find some token replacement method for code submissions so that evaluators can't extrapolate gender.
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Or, remove any reference to who the person doing the coding was in the first place. You could easily do this in any number of ways. The easiest would be to submit the code to be reviewed, and be handed a secure token so that it can be traced back once the review process is complete. From there, the programmer can get the code back to fix/update or be revealed once code is approved.
This way Code Snippet has a reference number and that is all the reviewers see.
But I know that programmers often collaborate and
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Mansplaining? Maybe it is more prevalent against women but I can guarantee that some guys (girls too) fresh out of school will do that to anyone who can hear it.
I usually blame it on inexperience, at school, you are taught to work in a vacuum and the real world isn't. Some people never seem to learn though.
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How do you know I am a man? Check your bias
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PMD (Score:4, Interesting)
https://pmd.github.io/ [github.io]
Use an automated code review to baseline. Compilers care nothing about genitalia.
As a programmer with decades of experience (Score:5, Funny)
I can say confidently that everyone is terrible.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Programming is a perfect, if often maddening, example of the creative problem-solving technique. The question, boiled down to its very essentials, is always this: how can I make this (expletive inserted or deleted as you wish) machine do what I want it to?
There are other, lesser, considerations, of course. The system will invariably impose all manner of restrictions: the memory space isn’t big enough, the language is limited, input-output devices won’t do what you would like them to. These beco
Male programmers to sue Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
This study could be used as proof that Facebook is discriminating against male programmers by hiring female programmers with worse coding skills just to meet some "diversity" goals.
That's nott how code review should work (Score:5, Insightful)
Code review isn't supposed to be about rejecting code, it's supposed to be about improving code and providing another set of eyes with a different perspective. In several years doing code reviews for men and women, and having my code reviewed by men and women (for >1000 overall), I can count on maybe two hands the number of changes that I'd count as rejected - either because the change was unneeded and I was misunderstanding, or because it was needed but I wasn't the person to do it because I wasn't experienced enough with the code I was changing. Many changes go through substantial rework, though as you gain experience you can write better code that needs fewer fixes - so if on average females are more junior (which is true across a wide range of industries and largely responsible for the gender pay gap) then they will on average face greater rework - though on an individual basis they will face less and less as they become more experienced just like everyone else.
But thinking of - or practicing - code review as adversarial or something where changes can be "rejected" (other than for mundane reasons like trying to change another team's code in ways that don't fit their model of how their code works) is an antipattern. The most senior people, people who literally have invented entire disciplines, still have their code reviewed and change it in response to feedback. My tech lead likes to say that "confusion is a signal" - if your code is so brilliant or clever that it leaves a brand new engineer going "wha?" then it means you have to fix it, regardless of how senior you are, since the code should be understandable by the average employee. And when I review code I don't expect to pass down edicts, and probably 10-15% of my comments receive pushback from the author. It has to be a real problem for me to actually refuse to accept a change - maybe that's happened twice for reasons of code quality and not the mundane stuff I mentioned earlier like "I planned to rewrite how that test worked anyway, let's hold off on this hacky fix since I'll fix it properly". I prefer to chat informally with the author (and, and as an author, vice-versa) to come to something mutually agreeable, which lets me understand their concerns and vice-versa - and we both learn something.
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They're probably calling the normal process of commenting on a CR without giving a ship-it "rejection". As in: women upload more diffs than men before getting a ship-it, which may have little to do with code quality (perceived or real) in any way.
Alternative hypothesis... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or facebook doesn't get enough qualified women applying and thus hires less qualified women for programming jobs because they don't like the gender imbalance.
This results in the average quality of female engineers being lower - resulting in both women not rising in the ranks and in lower quality patches.
Rejected? Define it, please. (Score:3)
What kind of code review system rejects code?
The purpose of a peer-review system for code isn't to exclude bad code, it's to fix it so that it's good code before it goes in. Maybe when they say "rejects" they mean "receives comments requesting adjustments"? If that's what they're measuring, then I'm still confused. In my experience, assuming you're doing reasonably-thorough reviews, almost every non-trivial change gets some comments, and has to be updated a bit before it can be merged.
In the words of Richard Feynman (Score:2)
I know it's not quite coding however it is interesting to apply [youtube.com].
This "everything is sexist" attitude is tiresome. (Score:2)
This seemed to suggest that a female engineer's work was more heavily scrutinized...
... suggested that the code rejections were due to engineering rank, not gender...
... speculate that Parikh's findings mean female engineers might not be rising in the ranks as fast...
... or perhaps that female engineers are leaving the company more often before being promoted.
This author seems to be a moron. I suggest that Facebook hires an independent investigator, if this is truly a thorn in their side worth removing. (It's probably not). I wish "news" outlets such as The Verge would not be so quick to speculate...perhaps they're just pushing their biased point of view with no consideration for anything else?
The odds are that Facebook's men are working longer hours and taking less time off than their female coworkers. Even in the same position with the same experience a
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The problem is compound by how free speech is quite dead. Say what you just said openly in a workplace of a semi-famous company. You will get fired faster than you can finish your sentence.
And yeah, it's basically impossible to control for all factors here. It could be a genuine gender difference (after all, people keep trying to drill in our head that things need to be done differently to attract female engineers, so they have to be different somehow), and it's not even necessarily negative either. It coul
Simple answer (Score:3)
Stop including name, rank, and sex as part of the code or review process. Just review the end product based on efficiency. I worked at a large institution and they hired a far greater % of the female applicants than the males, but still ended up with an environment dominated by younger males. You cant hire those that don't apply.
look at the evidence (Score:2)
All the evidence indicates that its actually down to the relative quality of their work, yet here we are somehow still "speculating" that it actually _must_ be gender bias.
ratemycode.com (Score:2)
As expected, a lot of people here being all "maybe it's something else". I'd love to see an anonymized dataset online for folks to rate publicly, and see how the results fall out.
Women treat women worse than men treat women (Score:3)
Re:Gender bias? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe they were hired for their looks not their leet coding skills. Not like that would EVER happen.
This. Exactly this. Posting as AC for obvious reasons. I've worked in the Bay Area for over 12 years for different companies, and I've seen it many times. Mediocre female engineers (software, electrical or network) get hired based on diversity quotas and in many cases their looks as well. Managers find out after about a year or so that their hires weren't such a good fit to the team as they hoped, and they end up promoting the mediocre engineers to poor managers. Now the good engineers report to the mediocre ones and get frustrated, and eventually leave the company. And of course, the /. feminazi crew will downmod this, but the truth has to be said.
/. or CNN of course.
I also need to add that I have seen many, many good female engineers. It's just that the ones that get hired based on their looks or for other reasons than their engineering qualities are usually not a good fit for the company. The good ones are often very much appreciated, and I've seen many occasions where they are paid the most of the entire team. But you never hear that on
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Actually, if statistically women average less at lifting (they do), it exactly means that the average woman lifts less than the average man. That is a true fact (there only used to be true facts before the big fat oompa loompa took the office).
It's a good thing you posted as AC.
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Well, that's ambiguous English for you. "Average man" in informal speech usually means the mode, not the mean. It is possible with lopsided distributions. Of course, for the actual case at hand, mean median and mode are all higher for men.
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I was going with a proper definition, being that this site is aimed at non-idiots I figured that proper use of technical terms would be assumed.
See here for definition:
http://www.purplemath.com/modu... [purplemath.com]
This:
Mean, median, and mode are three kinds of "averages". There are many "averages" in statistics, but these are, I think, the three most common, and are certainly the three you are most likely to encounter in your pre-statistics courses, if the topic comes up at all.
The "mean" is the "average" you're used to
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I was going with a proper definition, being that this site is aimed at non-idiots I figured that proper use of technical terms would be assumed.
You must have mis-typed that URL. Sounds like you were going someplace interesting.
But specifically the term "average man" is confusing, as it's an idiom meaning "most representative" in normal speech.
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Yeah, that was a simplistic site but these are simplistic terms.
Again, at a nerd-focused site, I took it for granted that "average man" implied the proper definition of "average" as used in statistics. Normal speech here is anything but normal, it is/can/should be more technical. Even for the trivial stuff.
Re: (Score:3)
Except that because we're humans, it doesn't work that way. However, I would think that the bias would go in the other direction if there is one. That is, some male nerd (horny by definition) would be more likely to look more favorably than justified on a female's code because there is always the hope of a liaison at some point in the future.
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That's probably already the case. Most environments, at best, you see a username at the beginning of a change request but unless I have to hunt down the "blame" for a line of code across several different repo technologies (things that went from CVS to Mercurial to Git), it never matters WHO wrote the code.
And whether jsmith is John or Jane is the least of my worries and doesn't even come into play in large organizations.
Gender has nothing to do with this, this is just fitting a story to fit the data. Rejec
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The reverse most definitely would be news, but would have a very different spin. "Female programmers write better code!" Would be the headline, they'd never attribute it to bias. In fact, the article would likely imply that it was despite bias instead of because of it.
Facebook discriminates in their hiring practices, and this is the result. We've had it drilled in to us for years that discrimination harms your company, and yet given the choice, all big companies rush to discriminate in their hiring practice
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If you hire based on race, religion, gender, age, or any other variables unrelated to the quality of the work the applicant can do, you guarantee that you do not get the best employees. This is not a surprise.
Just because you're discriminating in socially acceptable ways doesn't stop it from being discrimination, and the quality of your employees will reflect that.