Facebook rejects gender bias claims

Rejecting claims that the code written by female engineers at Facebook gets rejected more often, the company has said that the analysis is "incomplete and inaccurate".

The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported that based on an analysis by an engineer at Facebook, it was found that code written by females at its engineering department got rejected more often than those written by men.

"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.

The spokesperson further added: "Any meaningful discrepancy based on the complete data is clearly attributable not to gender but to seniority of the employee."

The earlier analysis had claimed that female engineers received 35 per cent more rejections of their code than male engineers.

It also stated that women had to wait longer than men to get their code accepted, and received more comments and questions than men.

The method of analysis could not be assessed nor could it be verified, even by The WSJ that reported the gender bias at Facebook's engineering department.

According to Facebook's Head of Infrastructure Jay Parikh, the gap in rejection rate was not due to gender, but rank.

"So, Facebook's argument is essentially that because there are not as many women in higher-ranked engineering roles, their code is subject to more scrutiny," TechCrunch noted.

Women, who make up 17 per cent of Facebook's technical department are not in higher-ranking roles and that is a problematic sign.

--IANS

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