A report from The Wall Street Journal claims Facebook may have a gender bias issue within its engineering department, but the social network has quickly denied the claim. Facebook says the allegations are “incomplete and inaccurate.”
They’re based on an analysis conducted by an engineer who was using an incomplete data set, says Facebook. That engineer found code written by females is rejected more often, which could potentially indicate some form of bias.
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. – Facebook
The analysis found females experienced 35% more rejections and they also waited 3.9% longer to get their code accepted.
When Facebook analyzed the data on its own, it found evidence of a rank bias, not a gender bias.
