Facebook Engineer: Women's Codes Rejected More Than Men

Facebook has an apparent gender bias when it comes to programming.

Code written by female engineers at Facebook was rejected 35 percent more than code written by men, according to findings uncovered last September by a longtime engineer at the company who gathered data on the subject, The Wall Street Journal reported. Screenshots of internal discussions on the matter were provided to the WSJ and people familiar with the findings spoke the newspaper.

Facebook called the analysis "incomplete and inaccurate — performed by a former Facebook engineer with an incomplete data set," and conducted its own review of the study led by Jay Parikh, the company's head of infrastructure.

Parikh attributed any gap in rejection rates to an engineer's rank.

The engineer who conducted the analysis did it "so that we can have an insight into how the review process impacts people in various groups," the WSJ reported. She analyzed five years of data from Facebook's open-repository of code-review data, which included an engineer's city, gender, team, and tenure at the company.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, questioned about the report at a weekly town hall with employees, said gender bias was "an issue," according to a person in attendance.

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