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Gender@Facebook
The Wall Street Journal’s news pages published an article last week accusing Facebook of systematically discriminating against its female engineers. After reviewing five years worth of data, a “longtime” engineer at Facebook, who remained unnamed in the article, found that the work of female engineers was rejected far more often than that of male engineers. Women also waited 3.9 percent longer to have their code accepted and got 8.2 percent more questions and comments about their work. The report added a disparate impact claim: “Only 13 percent of Facebook’s engineers are women.”
An analysis of this report by ThinkProgress concluded, “Facebook’s gender bias goes so deep it’s in the code”—and then drew the further inference that embedded discrimination against women by higher-ups in the firm explains much of the persistence of this disheartening pattern At least as of yet, there has been no effort to convert these charges of social insensitivity into a legal claim. Indeed, Facebook has made every effort to get out in front of the problem: It has climbed unequivocally onto the diversity bandwagon through committing to build “an employee base that reflects a broad range of experiences, backgrounds, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, abilities and many other characteristics.”
Beyond that, Facebook offered a gender-neutral explanation for the differences. They are best explained, Facebook claimed, by the simple fact that engineers at the lower levels of the company’s hierarchy, where female engineers occupy a proportionally larger part of the positions, make more coding mistakes. But that explanation leaves the critics unhappy. It shows that Facebook has a latent bias in its refusal to promote its female engineers at the same rate as its male engineers. On the critics’ view, the quality of the work of the two groups of engineers is identical, so that all observed variations in promotions or code rejection rates must be attributable to some form of implicit bias or overt discrimination.
That conclusion is overhasty. What is missing from this picture is any explanation of why these differences persist in the face of strenuous and explicit efforts at Facebook—and indeed, at all of its major competitors for talent like Google, Amazon, and Apple—to overcome them. A fuller explanation of the picture suggests an alternative account that all major corporations are reluctant to embrace publicly. The reason for the differential treatment of coding is that the code produced by the female engineers does, indeed, contain more errors than that put out by their male counterparts. Those errors can undermine the efficiency and attractiveness of a product used by billions of consumers.
Neither Facebook’s critics nor the company itself has published any data on the observed coding results. In principle, however, it should be easy enough for someone on a sex-blind basis to examine the output of the male and female engineers to see if the differential error rates persist. If they do not, then some claim of implicit bias, if not outright discrimination, becomes credible. But if those differences continue, the clear inference is that any charge of implicit bias is unfounded. Indeed, if the gender differences increase, the data would then support the claim that some discrimination, probably explicit, in favor of female engineers is built into the Facebook culture. Some affirmative action for female engineers is certainly consistent with Facebook’s diversity program.
In the absence of any hard data from Facebook, it is necessary to look elsewhere to determine which of these possibilities is likely to be true. That data is not difficult to find. One key question is whether the Facebook engineers have equal credentials at the time they are hired. Thus, it is instructive to look back at the available evidence on educational achievement as a rough proxy for entry-level ability. On this question, the evidence is unequivocal. In Facebook’s elite applicant pool, male candidates as a group have stronger math skills than female candidates
It is important to stress that this proposition does not foolishly assert that all male engineers or scientists are superior to all female engineers and scientists at measured quantitative skills. What it does assert is that a full description of the aptitudes and skills of both sexes will produce distributions that differ not only in their means but also in their standard deviation (i.e. the spread), both of which are higher for males than females. The available numbers for general IQ are a mean of 101.461 for boys with a standard deviation of 15.235, and a mean of 99.681 for girls with a standard deviation 14.085. The same results are found when one looks at high school graduates’ class and test scores in math. On the SAT, the median score for boys is 526 and for girls is 496. Equally important is that this gap cannot be attributed to boys taking more advanced math courses, because more girls are enrolled in AP classes in math and receive on average a higher fraction of A+ grades.
These gender differences become even more pronounced at the very top of the distribution, for SAT scores of 800. Here the boys outperform girls by a two-to-one ratio on the math test. More critically perhaps, the gender gap gets wider in the elite competitions sponsored by the high-powered American Mathematics Competitions. What is clearly at work in these circumstances is that boys gain skills relative to girls, so that when they enter the labor market some four or five years later, they have on average stronger qualifications, even though it is virtually certain that some women will be at or near the very top of the distribution.
The same point is reinforced by the far greater percentage of male students in the STEM disciplines [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], for which it is of course possible to offer social explanations. If these explanations are true, then the gap should narrow of its own accord, but the gap will only close if the performance levels of males and females reach parity. But right now, any claim of discrimination against female engineers is weak. There is no professional or economic reason why Facebook would pass over strong female engineers to hire weaker male ones. Currently, it is most likely that Facebook has both a relative paucity of female engineers and an extensive affirmative action program—which, ironically, could be bringing down the average ability level of the female hires if more women are hired with lesser qualifications.
The hypothesis that Facebook has a paucity of elite-level female engineers gains strength from a May 2017 high-profile study from the Bella group. The study, led by MIT professor Josh Lerner, addresses ownership by gender of firms in four key financial sectors: mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity, and real estate. The report concludes that “the industry is afflicted by a lack of diversity,” such that women-owners “are dramatically underrepresented in all asset classes.” For example, in private equity, 1.9 percent of the firms are women-owned and their firms control only 1.5 percent of assets under management. In real estate, only 0.7 percent of the funds are women-owned. The report also notes that diverse firms, small as they are, often enjoy high rates of return.
Unfortunately, this report does not even try to explain why these differences might exist. In particular, the authors offer no explanation as to why, in a market characterized by free entry, other diverse firms have not been founded. The simplest explanation is that the pool of available talent is limited. Nor do the authors appreciate that the legal regime governing firm-formation is not covered by the same antidiscrimination laws that cover employees: These laws do not prevent any person, male or female, from starting a new venture. At that point, moreover, no impediments from existing firm culture can hamper their internal operations. Diverse and female-run firms can create desirable internal environments to recruit coveted financial analysts and engineers with strong quantitative skills. Nor are potential customers or suppliers likely to systematically punish female and diverse start-up companies, given the huge social consensus backing diversity.
The best explanation for the lack of gender parity at organizations like Facebook is that the founders are self-selected from a larger talent pool of males at the far right of the ability distribution, without any affirmative action pressures. In starting new companies, major entrepreneurs—from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg—do not have to share their wealth. But once these superstars create a successful firm, like Facebook, they choose to use some of their profits to subsidize female engineers for a variety of reasons—which, as private firms, they are entitled to do. But any claim that they act with some form of implicit bias against female engineers is, as of yet, not supported by any credible evidence.
© 2017 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
Published in General
I wonder if the majority-male workers want to flirt with the females, and as a result look at their code with more scrutiny and give more comments. Recall that comments can be positive as well as negative. It might be more interesting to find out at what rate women get salary increases or promotions to higher positions.
It’s very likely that women are going to be better at human interface issues because they have more natural empathy. I wonder if we would be better off addressing this kind of difference and seeing that men and women might be better at different, not necessarily better or worse, aspects of technology. I know it took me a long time to develop the empathy needed to produce a different user interface, and it was through working with different types of people that I was able to eventually learn it.
I’m not convinced this is a pressing issue.
Or an issue.
Good article. Thank you.
It is easy to believe that this might be the case — and there’s a real “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” quality to that, if so.
I favor browbeating and bullying Facebook until these differences disappear, in the hope that this will cause Fakebook to become less successful and less profitable, thus loosening its stranglehold on our social media system.
In my experience, if it’s “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” then the most logical choice is: “don’t.”
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I’d be happy if all social media was destroyed by fire and brimstone.
My company has announced that their new policy is to strive for a 50/50 mix of female and male entry level engineers. Since only about 20 percent of engineering graduates are women, this means hiring criteria for women will have to be watered down substantially.
Why can’t people understand how this hurts the cause of equality? If we start hiring sub-standard female engineers to meet a quota, it will merely reinforce the idea among some that women can’t do engineering, because about 60% of those hires will be on average weaker than the male hires they are working with.
Ironically, I also had to sign our annual ethics policy, which mandates that under no circumstances will anyone in the company be allowed to use race, gender, political affiliation or religion to discriminate one applicant from another. How that can possibly be consistent with the ‘equality’ campaign is a mystery.
Or, from another perspective, it will make it more difficult for men to be hired. Not that anyone cares about that.
Thank goodness nothing like this would ever be considered in a life-or-death undertaking… say, the military, for example.
As we in psychology grad school used to say, once again Science discovers the obvious. Maybe, just maybe, not as many girls want to be software engineers as boys. Maybe most girls as they are growing up spend less time than the boys playing video games. Maybe, just maybe, girls’ brains are hard-wired differently than boys’. Why are there fewer female coders and engineers at all tech firms? Because not as many girls want to be software engineers!! And how many of the female engineers at Facebook are promoted past their ability, just to make the “diversity” figures look better?
The articles on this don’t define what “rejected” means at Facebook….Rejected because there were a couple of typos and one piece of mistaken logic is entirely different from rejected because the fundamental architecture of the module is bad and can never work.
The articles also don’t define who in the organization defines the human interface and when this defining is done…the implication is that it is defined by the person writing the code at the same time the code is written, which some people would consider an undesirable practice.
I’m confused. If there are, as Facebook maintains, fifty-one (or so) genders, and women account for 13 percent of Facebook’s engineers, then women may very well account for a plurality of the genders at the company.
I know it’s the Left Coast but there aren’t that many
mentally-ill mennon-cisgender conforming heterosexual males in San Francisco.You are sex a sexist. Society would be so much better if women ignored their superior empathy ;)
Equality of opportunity doesn’t mean equality of results. This or that group succeeds and this or that group fails. Sadly, instead of talking about why this or that group fails or succeeds American society wants everything to be equal.
It would be decent and fair and noble to consider the idea that female engineers at facebook aren’t as good as the male engineers. If female engineers at Facebook aren’t as good as their male counterparts they can: work harder, take online classes, and ask their peers to review their work more thoroughly. I think of the UFC at times like this. In the UFC Brazilian jujiutsu artists dominated the sport. As a response, everybody in the UFC started studying Brazilian jiujutsu or similar forms of grappling to up their game. They became stronger and better instead of giving affirmative action to people who didn’t train in Brazilian juijitsu.
If women are discriminated against that is, of course, detestable but we shouldn’t immediately assume that different results are caused by discrimination without thoroughly thinking through the evidence.
I wonder if the effect goes away if you control for national origin.
There is a theory that the reason that Software became a male dominated profession in the 80’s after being predominantly female because of how personal computers were marketed as toys for men in America. I don’t know if I buy it, but it is the kind of story that could be explanatory if it is actually true.
Purely anecdotally, there are female software engineers in my office, and they all seem to be pretty good. But I think only one of them was born in the United States. Yet, the QA engineers are predominantly female and born in the United States, despite seeming to be just as intelligent (most of them are transplants from other careers that required serious study).
I was there in those days and didn’t observe this.
I don’t think it was ever *predominantly* female, but it was a lot high % than it is currently. One likely explanation for part of this is that there are a lot more opportunities open to women than there were in the 1970s/1980s…some women who might have become programmers are now becoming (shudder) lawyers. And certainly some women with a technical bent plus the right kind of personality choose now to become business-to-business sales reps (and quite likely make more money than they would have in programming.)
Re the ‘how PCs were marketed to guys’ suggestion, the general public image of the computer-game-player was/is pretty scruffy (whatever the actual truth may be), quite different than the earlier image of the programmer/engineer, who may have been Square but did look at least a little bit professional.
My Dad didn’t either, but there’s data to suggest this; I’ll try to hunt for it again.
Though, that comes with the caveat that most “programmers” don’t actually work for sofware companies, but other large organizations (e.g. banks) whose primary business isn’t software. So most programmers don’t actually intuitively get a sense for what the field as a whole looks like; they tend to assume more people write applications than actually do.
I believe the argument these people used is that those scruffy kids were the ones who decided to learn CompSci in college, when CompSci became a thing to study. Being scruffy kids, (as opposed to potential Electrical Engineers or something, idk I’m not old enough to kjow what I’m talking about), they somehow drove women away because women weren’t scruffy gamers like them. Or something. Or women didn’t study it because, the computer became male and scruffy so chose something else.
The only reason why I find it somewhat plausible is that it’s a story that tries to explain why teenage girls don’t find the computer interesting, at the time of their life when they’re making decisions about how to invest in their human capital. Which is the necessary thing to explain the gender split, given the lack of obviously discriminatory employment practices.
I don’t care about social media one way or the other. I think it’s Facebook and Twitter, but I wouldn’t want to swear to it.
I was at a college graduation ceremony on Sunday. About half (or maybe a little more) of the BA degrees were awarded to women. Most of the BAs in Music were awarded to women. Most of the BS degrees were awarded to men. And then we came to the degrees in nursing. Out of about 40 graduates, about 2 were men. Hmmm. I suspect this college was discriminating against men in the nursing program. Why else would there be such a gender discrepancy? Why is no one outraged by this?? Why doesn’t the school just take equal numbers of female nursing students and male engineering students and swap them into each others’ programs? No need to ask if this is what they want because – Equality!!!!
I find it hilarious that it’s considered significant that women have to wait “3.9 percent longer to have their code accepted.” I have no idea whether it takes days, weeks, months, or years to have code accepted, but let’s say the average for men is 30 days. It’s significant that for women it’s 31 days?
You can pick any two groups – people above and below a certain height, or people who are left-handed and right-handed – and you will always find a slightly different outcome. But 3.9 percent is risibly inconsequential.
If you really want to find a problem, then you probably will.
Computer bugs have no gender.
Just make sure all the male programmers you hire are blockheads. That’ll fix up any disparities in no time.
I don’t care how much information or how tightly reasoned an argument is. This is the kind of article that gets people fired.
I was working for a university computer center at the time. It was my first computer job. Most of us except perhaps the operators did some programming. Of those of us who worked enough hours to merit offices, one was a woman. The other people I knew who did programming for private companies (COBOL-type stuff) were predominantly male. So, it’s a small sample, but you’d have to go a long ways to get to predominantly female. I did go to demos, user group meetings, conferences, and such in those pre-personal-computer days at that job and my next one, and there were women who were programmers, but their presence was far from predominant.
Ricochet is social media.
That reminds me of a meme I saw on Facebook the other day. It had a picture of a young white man overdosing. The meme said. “Heroin kill more white men than any other drug, good job heroin”. It got a pathetic number of shares and likes.
Actually their might be a gender discrimination component to the problem at Facebook, Twitter and the other bigger IT firms. The question not being asked is how much of their work force is Indian. I have noticed that many IT departments once the Indians get into management the department tends to change over to mostly male and mostly Indian staffing. The non Indian and female workers to get pushed out of the department or get lesser jobs in the department.
So, back in the dinosaur days of the late 80s, when I started college at a certain prestigious university in Pittsburgh founded by a steel magnate, the ratio of guys to girls (I will not claim that at 17-18 we were “men” and “women”) was 8:3.
My sophomore year, TPTB decided to accept an equal number of guys and girls in the incoming freshman class.
Now, I will admit, that year the freshman girls were more plentiful and much better looking. For a few weeks.
At the beginning of the semester, you’d see them going to the cafeteria (which may or may not have been named for a Scottish castle brought over brick by brick to Pennsylvania by the aforementioned steel magnate) before their first class, wearing makeup, hair done, and dressed in cute clothes.
Three weeks in, by the first exams, they were dragging themselves to class chugging coffee, no makeup, in sweats, with their hair in bandannas.
After Fall midterms there were roughly 50% fewer of them, and the ratio had returned to normal.
That is not to say there are no smart women. I’m married to one and was raised by another (of whom, my nuclear physicist father says, “she’s smarter than either one of us.”). But very few that I’ve known decide that the academic route is what they want. Roughly 3 of out 8, in my experience. ;)
We had a joke when I was in Pgh: There are only actually 6 women here. One’s hot, and two have nice legs. They all just move around very fast, so it looks like there are more of them. If you stare at them, you’ll see them oscillating.
We also had another joke: What’s the difference between CMU and Hell? You know there are hot women in Hell!
Thanks, I’ll be here all week.