Female Engineer at Facebook Claims Gender Bias, Company Denies

Following the recent controversy around gender bias in coding at Facebook, the social media giant has come out in defence of its work environment saying that the claim is half-baked and inaccurate. Recently, The Wall Street Journal had published a report based on a former female Facebook employee’s data that “Code written by women was rejected much more frequently than code written by their male colleagues.”

The social media company defends itself by saying that there is no gender-bias in the company, but a lack of women in higher-ranked positions is expanding the gap in rejection rate.

“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,” TechCrunch quoted a Facebook spokesperson as saying.

“Any meaningful discrepancy based on the complete data is clearly attributable not to gender but to the 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.”

The analysis published by WSJ revealed that women engineers’ codes in Facebook were rejected 35% more than their male counterparts.

Another finding reflected that  female engineers had to wait 3.9 per cent times more and received 8.2 per cent more feedback and counter-questions than men working in the company.

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In response to the former employee’s research, Facebook came up with its own data report, claimed WSJ. The company’s data report showed that the gap in rejection rate is not because of gender but rank.

The social media company defends itself by saying that there is no gender-bias in the company, but lack of women in higher-ranked positions is expanding the gap in rejection rate. The spokesperson said that codes at higher-level are scrutinised much more than lower-level and it is a problem that women make up only 17% of the entire technical team of Facebook.

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