Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is your username green?
Why is parent being downvoted for asking a simple question?
Facebook. See my comment.
Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
91–100 of 123 posts
Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
#92Earlier 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…
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 differences lead to huge difference in representation of exceptionally smart people, because of how normal distribution works. These differences manifest themselves in tasks requiring high intelligence, such as chess, go, engineering and software development.
I say this as a scientific statement, with zero sexism implied. I believe that people should not be afraid to state scientific truths, no matter how controversial they may seem.
[0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606...
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886911...
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289606...
[3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289604...
Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
#93Creating a throwaway since I've taken part of this internal discussion at Facebook. Once normalized for skill level (i.e. junior engineer, engineer, senior engineer) the level of rejection between genders is the same.
I'd be happier with your statement if you replaced "skill level" with "seniority", because the two aren't really equivalent.
The study that showed the bias accounted for seniority at Facebook (though not previous experience). That seems more valid overall than "rank" which, if these biases do exist, one would expect to also be influenced by them.
Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
#94tldr 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 f…
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.
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.
Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
#96A couple of standout points from this article: * the data itself hasn't been released so no one outside of Facebook has in any way analyzed it, we're relying on their analysis and reportage of that analysis to be correct * the rejection rate is not just higher for female engineers, it's a lot higher: 35% * Facebook is confident that the effect is not due to gender bias (scrutinizing female workers' code more closely)…
The study that found the 35% controlled for seniority (at Facebook). It would be most correct to use overall experience including prior to FB, but it is probably less correct to use promotion level when promotion decisions would very likely suffer from the same biases.
https://www.google.com/amp/www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017...
Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an unsolved problem in hiring? To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any satisfying answers.
I suppose that if a company is going to try to artificially hire a greater number of a single group then naturally the bar must be lowered. Take this hypotherital: Bob's factory employs machinists to make parts. Of all machinists, 20% belong to group A and 80% belong to group B. When hiring, Bob's factory selects a number of applicants who pass the test. If we assume that group A and group B have the same average ski…
> If we assume that group A and group B have the same average skill level
This assumption, on which your argument rests, is invalid.
I'm an engineering college student who's had conversations on this subject with admissions officers at my school. The gender ratio of accepted students is much more balanced than the gender ratio of applicants. Every year, the admissions department fields complaints from upset male applicants who were rejected; they feel that they were done a disservice because "the bar was higher" for them than for the female applicants. They point to the different acceptance rates for men and women as proof of this "lower bar" for women.
In reality, according to my school's admissions officers, the average female applicant is significantly stronger than the average male applicant. There exists, apparently, a huge volume of unqualified male applicants, who inflate that "80%" figure despite having no real chance at earning a position. We're talking SAT scores hundreds of points below the typical admitted student, no actual engineering experience, things like that. (I have heard that large companies like Texas Instruments also have this problem, which is why they place restrictions on which specific degrees applicants can have - to filter out that chaff.)
These men remain in the applicant pool where women would've washed out, the admissions officers at my school hypothesize, because it is easier for women to "give up" on STEM fields at the first sign of trouble due to social / societal pressures. Incompetent men, however, can think they're good at STEM more or less forever.
A more reasonable conclusion to draw, instead of "Facebook's male engineers are more skilled than their female engineers", would be the one that is presented in the article by the people who have the data. Namely, that this statistic arises from the confounding effect of seniority: Facebook's more senior engineers tend to be male, since the drive to hire more women has been more recent, and more senior engineers have code accepted more often.
Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also a biased assumption that women are worse developers... seems a little quick to jump to that conclusion.
It's more like... if 1 good female developer gets a CS degree for every 10 good male developers, you would expect the workforce to be 10% female. However, if you artificially force 50% female representation you'll have to start drawing upon bad female developers since the rate of good developers is currently only 10%. You first have to increase the output of good female developers from schools before you can scale up…
one might say that "you have to increase the means of production"
Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
#99Re: Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
#100Earlier 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…
That's a pretty solid argument that a lot of people aren't going to like.