Facebook more likely to reject code made by women

Being a Facebook engineer is a Handmaiden’s tale 

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.

Code written by women was less likely to make it through Facebook’s internal peer review system. It is unlikely that women write shittier code than blokes, so it means that the peer review is being harder on women than men.

It means that Facebook’s efforts at diversity efforts are just rubbish. The company’s workforce is just 33 percent female, with women holding just 17 percent of technical roles and 27 percent of leadership positions. So if those women have to work harder than men because their work is going to be more heavily scrutinised it is rather unfair.

To be fair, Facebook was alarmed by this data and 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. So the issue is that because women do not rise to the top as fast as men statistically they are more likely to be stuck in a grade where there are picked on.

Either possibility could result in the 35 percent higher code rejection rate for female engineers.