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

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

#111

Post by geofft »

m1el wrote: post #92
geofft wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Let's assume for a moment, that engineering requires intelligence, and to be a top engineer you need to be in the top X% percentile of the population. As it turns out the distribution of IQ in men and women is different[0][1][2][3], with men having more variation (more extremely dumb men and more extremely smart men), and an ever so slightly higher median (men have slightly higher IQ on average). These small differen…

Thank you! I think this analysis is simplistic and has a lot of room for questions, but it is an analysis and it is data-supported, and I respect that. (And I don't think that citing these facts is sexist in any way.)

One line of argument occurs to me: my understanding is that the breakdown of incoming freshmen at top colleges (by which I mean the sorts of colleges Facebook tries very hard to recruit from) is very gender-balanced, much more so than would be implied by the normal distributions you cite. This raises two questions:

1. Are these colleges selecting students for some reason other than general intelligence (whether this is "political correctness" or "intelligence isn't everything" is irrelevant to this question), and if so, can we measure the IQ of men and women at these colleges and find a significant difference? Even if men and women as a whole have different IQ distributions, I would initially assume men and women at top colleges to have comparable IQ distributions (because that's what college admissions should select for), but I can believe that this is not true.

2. How much is raw general intelligence useful for software engineering compared to the pedigree of having attended one of these top schools? I would assume that being in the 95th percentile of intelligence and having a degree from one of these schools is more likely to lead to success than being in the 98th percentile and not, but, again, I can very easily be convinced otherwise.

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

#112

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

m1el wrote: post #110
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I argue that there are biological differences between men and women, and these differences are causing different representation in STEM fields. I argue that you don't actually have any reason to believe that the differences are biological instead of social. Certainly, while extremely interesting (I mean that. Not sarcasm.), none of your links demonstrate it. Your links claim to show a difference, but they do not cl…

> I argue that you don't actually have any reason to believe that the differences are biological instead of social. I could provide studies on how IQ development is set by genetics and very early childhood. So yes, I do have a reason to believe IQ is biological. > Only a properly regulated market ever sorts itself out. This is true, but "we must hire women otherwise people think we're sexist" is not a properly regula…

> I could provide...

Well I could provide a tortoise that speaks seven different languages. Saying what you could provide is fairly bad form.

> and very early childhood.

Wait, how early? Which part of childhood is the genetic part? Heck, what about the potential for non-uniform distribution of teratogens? Has that even been studied?

> but "we must hire women otherwise people think we're sexist" is not a properly regulated market

"We should prefer to choose an equally qualified woman because not only is she presently equally qualified, but she has achieved being equally qualified in an environment that in-many-small-ways-collectively-and-constantly tries to prevent it" is, though. There is no shortage of well-qualified individuals in the world. And if you don't agree, then we must first begin another conversation on what exactly you think qualifies someone to develop software.

> But my conclusions do follow from studies.

They certainly don't follow from the ones you linked, even though you said they would. I know that because I read the studies you linked. So maybe these other ones also don't support your conclusions any better?

> If you take top 2% of people by IQ from a random population sample, you expect to have more men.

Maybe. Now tell me the part of the study that says why. And further tell me the part that indicates a positive correlation with success in computer software production. And then tell me the part that indicates positive correlation with representation in the field. And then tell me the part that indicates...heck, maybe that indicates that g is even a useful measurement to begin with.

Because you said, and I quote, "[biological] differences are causing different representation in STEM fields", which is an unsupported conclusion.

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

#113

Post by sctb »

kordless wrote: post #58

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 lev…

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 and marked it off-topic.

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

#114

Post by hyperdunc »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #105
hyperdunc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engineer…

> 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. I think it's pretty likely that the environmental conditions that hinder women from ever becoming engineers in the first place don't all suddenly go away for the ones who manage to do it anyway. Or are we talking about first principles here? Because I also…

"maybe-not-intentional-but-pretty-much-everywhere-nonetheless discrimination" is so vague it can be immediately dismissed.

If you're talking about culture or traditional gender roles, then I put forward that these are not primarily a result of discrimination but mostly evolved over quite a long time based on biological differences.

If we are going to deconstruct aspects of culture because we consider them unjust, we'd better be honest about why things are and what we might lose if we try to force certain outcomes.

A recent examination of a Scandinavian country purported to be globally the least discriminatory (Denmark or Norway - I don't recall which) of gender distributions in different fields showed increased unevenness.

In other words, given the agency by their culture, women tend to avoid STEM fields.

I think it's fair to say that everyone should be given the opportunities and challenges they can rise to, but no one should be coerced into any role for the sake of an asinine idea like "gender representation".

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

#115

Post by hyperdunc »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #104
hyperdunc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's clear women on the whole are not drawn to STEM. It's also clear that girls on the whole are not driven toward STEM by their adult mentors, and outside the bubble are actively discouraged from it. > It's certainly not primarily socially constructed. Certain, are you? Based on what?

No one should be driven toward any field they aren't interested in, nor should they be actively discouraged from anything they are interested in.

Today, different families and schools push varying expectations onto children. This cultural aspect is layered on top of biological differences in body and intelligence.

If we remove cultural impediments and allow biology to express itself more fully, the uneven distribution of gender in different fields increases. In other words, the relative evenness of the distribution we currently have is socially constructed.

So I'm not convinced by the argument that women (and indeed many men) are dissuaded because they hold negative stereotypes of people and working culture in STEM fields. However, I'm willing to keep an open mind on this, so if this is true then more effort should be made to welcome in talented outsiders.

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

#116

Post by jlebrech »

nathanasmith wrote: post #108
smt88 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

are what is 'code', maybe they were just textual changes (eg adding a contributor covenant)

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

#117

Post by tptacek »

m1el wrote: post #92
geofft wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Let's assume for a moment, that engineering requires intelligence, and to be a top engineer you need to be in the top X% percentile of the population. As it turns out the distribution of IQ in men and women is different[0][1][2][3], with men having more variation (more extremely dumb men and more extremely smart men), and an ever so slightly higher median (men have slightly higher IQ on average). These small differen…

This argument founders against a pretty simple rebuttal. Unless you believe software development of the variety practiced at places like Facebook is so intellectually challenging that its demands outstrip molecular biology, mathematics, and indeed all of science save the fields of physics, computer science, and engineering --- despite the fact that virtually all of science now requires deep facility with computers! --- then that argument has to account for the fact that every one of those fields has much better parity between men and women than software development.

Of course we all here understand that 80% of software development as practiced commercially is not especially intellectually demanding, being as it is essentially a series of variations of transforming database rows into text markup and back again.

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

#118

Post by m1el »

geofft wrote: post #111
m1el wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume for a moment, that engineering requires intelligence, and to be a top engineer you need to be in the top X% percentile of the population. As it turns out the distribution of IQ in men and women is different[0][1][2][3], with men having more variation (more extremely dumb men and more extremely smart men), and an ever so slightly higher median (men have slightly higher IQ on average). These small differen…

Thank you! I think this analysis is simplistic and has a lot of room for questions, but it is an analysis and it is data-supported, and I respect that. (And I don't think that citing these facts is sexist in any way.) One line of argument occurs to me: my understanding is that the breakdown of incoming freshmen at top colleges (by which I mean the sorts of colleges Facebook tries very hard to recruit from) is very ge…

> 1. Are these colleges selecting students for some reason other than general intelligence, and if so, can we measure the IQ of men and women at these colleges and find a significant difference?

I'm open to being wrong, but my prediction based on the data I have is either a) the measured IQ distribution is going to be different, with equal representation of sexes; b) the representation of sexes is going to be different with equal IQ distribution;

> 2. How much is raw general intelligence useful for software engineering compared to the pedigree of having attended one of these top schools?

That's a really good question, and the answer again is that I don't know. I don't even know how to measure this.

As an anecdote, I didn't attend a top CS college, but I'm a high-ish ranked software developer.

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

#119

Post by geofft »

m1el wrote: post #118
geofft wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I think this analysis is simplistic and has a lot of room for questions, but it is an analysis and it is data-supported, and I respect that. (And I don't think that citing these facts is sexist in any way.) One line of argument occurs to me: my understanding is that the breakdown of incoming freshmen at top colleges (by which I mean the sorts of colleges Facebook tries very hard to recruit from) is very ge…

> 1. Are these colleges selecting students for some reason other than general intelligence, and if so, can we measure the IQ of men and women at these colleges and find a significant difference? I'm open to being wrong, but my prediction based on the data I have is either a) the measured IQ distribution is going to be different, with equal representation of sexes; b) the representation of sexes is going to be differe…

I'd think that it would be fairly easy to measure, honestly: do a longitudinal study of new hires at several top companies, and come back 5 years later and see who's still in the industry and what their level of promotion is if so. You know both their educational history, their demographics, and their standardized test scores (a close-enough proxy for g), and you can see how well they predict success.

There will be biases (in the scientific sense) in the data because of how the interview process selects for successful candidates, which is going to be correlated with these three and probably many other things. But I think the study would still be sound.

(Also, it occurs to me that I've been making about one assumption that is likely to be untrue: that people who do better at top software engineering companies are actually better software engineers. It is entirely possible that software engineering companies are systematically failing to hire and promote the best software engineers, because their interview and review processes are broken. In fact, that is what the pervasive-sexism-in-tech hypothesis implies: that individuals are so sexist that they would prefer to hire a man over a more qualified women, possibly because they're subconsciously failing to realize that the man is actually less qualified. If we want to test this hypothesis seriously, we need to separate "actually a good dev" and "recognized as a good dev". I could easily believe that being in the top percentile of g is correlated with hiring and promotion, because it's easy to measure, but less tightly correlated with actually being good at your job.)

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

#120

Post by geofft »

hyperdunc wrote: post #95
geofft wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

> 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.

I don't think I believe any of these three claims.

For these I don't think asking for supporting evidence would help - these aren't claims where you can easily point to a research paper, but these are interpretations of a large amount of data (some rigorous, some anecdotal).

But it's interesting that we have such different interpretations, worldviews if you will, of the data we've seen. I think women are drawn just fine to STEM as a whole (if by "drawn" you mean "innate interest"), I think they're somewhat structurally discouraged by socially-constructed barriers to STEM as whole and, importantly, quite a bit more discouraged to software engineering in particular. And I don't think there's anything biological about it (unless you count the fact that many people with wombs plan to bear children and nobody without wombs does, and long parental leave is a serious career hit, but I'd still argue that 90% of that is a socially-constructed barrier and not a biological one).

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