Facebook accused of gender bias against women engineers

2025-04-28 02:14:09admin

Facebook is facing backlash over possible gender bias within its engineering team, according to a report from the Wall Street Journalon Tuesday.

Data collected by an engineer in 2016 suggests that code submitted by women at the company was rejected more frequently than men, according to the Journal. Specifically, that female engineers' code is rejected 35 percent more often than men's. The engineer no longer works for the company.

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In response to the allegations, senior officials at Facebook conducted their own internal review. However, they found that the rejection rates could be attributed to a Facebook engineer's rank and not their gender, according to the Journal. The company also said that its analysis was based on more complete data that the engineer didn't have access to.

However, it's possible that both interpretations could be true, and the problem is more nuanced. Some employees, again per the WSJ, argued that the company's conclusions instead reflected the fact that female engineers don't get promoted at the same rates as their male counterparts.

Women hold only 17 percent of technical roles at Facebook, according to the company's recent diversity numbers.

Essentially, employees posited a snarling feedback loop: Women engineers get more pushback on their code, slowing their rise through the ranks and then contributing to the perception that their expertise is less than that of their male counterparts, whose paths to promotion are greased with positive bias. The Journalwas not able to independently verify these claims.

In a statement, Facebook said that "the discrepancy simply reaffirms a challenge we have previously highlighted – the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be," but argued that the conclusions drawn by the former employee are based on "incomplete data" and are invalid.

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Facebook reiterated in an emailed statement to Mashable that the data is incomplete:

As we have explained, the Wall Street Journal is relying on analysis that is incomplete and inaccurate – performed by a former Facebook engineer with an incomplete data set. Any meaningful discrepancy based on the complete data is clearly attributable not to gender but to seniority of the employee. In fact, the discrepancy simply reaffirms a challenge we have previously highlighted – the current representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be.

Google's issue is over pay. Facebook's issue is over code and promotions. But the two issues are often tied together

Data suggesting gender bias has been vehemently contested in Silicon Valley, a place where such bias is largely accepted as common knowledge. Facebook's argument that the engineer's problematic data is incomplete and their exonerating data tells the whole true story is a justification that has been used before.

In 2015, Erica Baker, an engineer at Google at the time, put together a spreadsheet of Google employees' salaries. The data she collected showed pay inequities between male and female employees.

Google denied such a discrepancy, and Baker no longer works at the company. Sure, Baker's data may not have been complete -- just like the engineer at Facebook's -- but years later, the U.S. Labor Department accused Google of fostering an "extreme" gender pay gap. Google continued to deny that's the case, again using the defense of an incomplete dataset.

Google's issue is over pay. Facebook's issue is over code and promotions. But the two issues are often tied together and can dog employees for years as they change jobs. New York City recently passed a law forbidding companies to ask job applicants about salary history specifically so women and minorities, who are often underpaid, won't be at further disadvantage.

Do these companies have blind spots? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked about the internal review during a weekly town hall meeting and responded that gender bias is "an issue," according to theJournal.

Jay Parikh, Facebook’s head of infrastructure and the person responsible for the company's analysis, did not completely deny the discrepancy, and in his response to employees suggested that employees take Facebook's voluntary training course on biases.

"Consider the ways you could be a bias interrupter in your daily life," Parikh wrote, according to the Journal.

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