Female Facebook engineers may be victims of routine gender bias
An internal study conducted by Facebook into the treatment of female engineers versus their male colleagues has exposed widespread gender bias, with their work 35% more likely to be rejected than software written by men.
Female Facebook engineers may be victims of routine gender bias
Taken at face value the findings, recorded by a former employee, appear to indicate that female engineers face heavier scrutiny by Facebook’s internal peer review system, sparking sufficient concern for Facebook to commission a second study headed by head of infrastructure Jay Parikh.
This concluded that the discrepancies could be accounted for by rank not gender but far from drawing a line under the affair merely sparked a fresh bout of soul searching as to why women either weren’t being promoted in number or were choosing to leave.
The findings, which were leaked to the Wall Street Journal, cast a pall over Facebook’s efforts to diversify its workforce, with female members of staff accounting for just 33% of all employees – a figure which drops to just 17% of technical roles and 27% of management positions.
In a statement handed to the Verge, Facebook disputed the report as ‘incomplete and inaccurate’. The company said: “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.”
Silicon Valley has long been accused of being overly white and male, with fears that companies such as Apple could be stifling innovation through a lack of alternative thinking.