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

theguardian.com

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

#21

Post by danderino »

19eightyfour wrote: post #13
rimliu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I you sure it is no real representation? Last I checked male leads outnumbered females in real world too.

There's that right. But not all stories are about the corporate world or something like that. A lot of stories are about relationships or Adventures or fictional stories completely. In The stories of our lives, representation is mixed and balanced. So I don't think on-screen world does represent the real world... outside of extending say, inequality present in the corporate world, through narrative, to other Realms w…

I think pretty much everything is male dominated no?

Its not just corporate world. Sports, politics, business, war,etc.

>Secondly, movies are fictional worlds so they can represent whatever their creators choose them to represent. They could be representing more equally. They're not.

I don't think this is fair. Some movies are completely fictional, but most are set on reality in some way. And I bet that in those completely fictional films, the ratio is much closer.

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

#23

Post by ramblerman »

mc32 wrote: post #17
flukus wrote: post #2

> 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. > 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. This is a c…

Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation. With that in mind, it makes sense to "promote" fields to women where they are a minority and promote fields to men where they are a minority. At the same time, while we address the imbalances, we should be careful not to scare off people by making things sound worse then they are. Welcome people rather than shame people into acceptance. It's n…

> Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation

Gender equality is a good thing. I'm not sure why the assumption is that this means perfect parity across every industry.

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

#24

Post by 19eightyfour »

danderino wrote: post #21
19eightyfour wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's that right. But not all stories are about the corporate world or something like that. A lot of stories are about relationships or Adventures or fictional stories completely. In The stories of our lives, representation is mixed and balanced. So I don't think on-screen world does represent the real world... outside of extending say, inequality present in the corporate world, through narrative, to other Realms w…

I think pretty much everything is male dominated no? Its not just corporate world. Sports, politics, business, war,etc. >Secondly, movies are fictional worlds so they can represent whatever their creators choose them to represent. They could be representing more equally. They're not. I don't think this is fair. Some movies are completely fictional, but most are set on reality in some way. And I bet that in those comp…

Except it's really not. Reality is an equal number of female and male voices.

It's ridiculous movies don't tell women stories, nor show women characters; just "love interest", "plot device", etc. Even in fantasy a female lead is surrounded by a male ensemble or is a proto-male.

Hollywood: we have creative freedom, movies can be whatever we want, and we make them sexist.

IMHO, seeing Hollywood's sexism really ought not to be a too hard a place to start. People resist this. But they can't! Just google "best movie" and see all those male faces on posters. WTF Hollywood!

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

#25

Post by IshKebab »

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #22

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.

Difficult to work on a project without knowing who your coworkers are...

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

#26

Post by Iv »

cperciva wrote: post #5

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. That study has been so thoroughly debunked at this point that I'm incl…

Never heard of this study or it's debunking. I would owe you 2 TIL if you could provide some sources!

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

#27

Post by lj3 »

mc32 wrote: post #17
flukus wrote: post #2

> 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. > 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. This is a c…

Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation. With that in mind, it makes sense to "promote" fields to women where they are a minority and promote fields to men where they are a minority. At the same time, while we address the imbalances, we should be careful not to scare off people by making things sound worse then they are. Welcome people rather than shame people into acceptance. It's n…

> Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation.

Source? I've seen nothing that proves that gender balance is good for our economy or our future.

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

#28

Post by mc32 »

lj3 wrote: post #27
mc32 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation. With that in mind, it makes sense to "promote" fields to women where they are a minority and promote fields to men where they are a minority. At the same time, while we address the imbalances, we should be careful not to scare off people by making things sound worse then they are. Welcome people rather than shame people into acceptance. It's n…

> Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation. Source? I've seen nothing that proves that gender balance is good for our economy or our future.

One circumstantial word: Japan. Demographic equality isn't necessary, but acceptance and encouragement so that they may envision themselves in those jobs as a viable option, else we take the lazy way out and import labor to meet demand.

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

#29

Post by malandrew »

mc32 wrote: post #28
lj3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gender balance is a good thing for the economy and our future as a nation. Source? I've seen nothing that proves that gender balance is good for our economy or our future.

One circumstantial word: Japan. Demographic equality isn't necessary, but acceptance and encouragement so that they may envision themselves in those jobs as a viable option, else we take the lazy way out and import labor to meet demand.

But how is addressing a gender imbalance a solution to that problem. There are many ways to address a shortage of talent in an occupation besides moving people from one gender from one occupation to another, especially the naturally talented (nb: intelligent is a highly heritable trait). Furthermore that solution will likely just result in a talent shortage in the occupation you're moving people away from, requiring other solutions like bringing in talent from abroad.

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

#30

Post by diyseguy »

I've seen this before. I'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't necessarily write better code, often it is worse.

I think this could be improved by a system of code review anonymization that sends code reviews out - company wide - without identifying author info.

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