Facebook engineer says companys female engineers have code rejected more than men

facebook inc engineer says companys female engineers have code rejected mora than menFacebook engineer says companys female engineers have code rejected more than menWhen Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote Lean In, it launched a national movementaround womens leadership and what it takes to break glass ceilings. But according to a Tuesday report from the Wall Street Journal, Facebook itself is facing allegations that the work of female engineers isnt getting a fair shake at the company.Analyzing five years of Facebooks open code-review data, an unnamed female engineer found that female engineers got their code rejected 35% more than their male peers.According to a screenshot of her internal post that the Journal obtained, she said she did this so that we can have an insight into how the review process impacts people in various groups.Checking performance, or undermining work?At Facebook, code needs to be reviewed by peers before it gets accepted. Women appear to wait longer and get i nspected more closely.In this engineers report, she said that women had to wait 3.9% longer than men to get their code accepted and faced 8.2% more questions about their code than their male counterparts.This engineers post was made in September and she has since moved on from Facebook, but her analysis sparked internal debates among Facebook employees.Facebook followed up with the engineers conclusion by conducting their own analysis. While the female engineer looked at an engineers tenure at Facebook, the official analysis looked at an engineers rank.A question of rank for women engineersThis led Facebooks head of infrastructure, Jay Parikh, to dispute gender being the main factor to code rejection. Although Parikh acknowledged that the gender review gap was still observable and felt by many of you, Parikh said an engineers rank was the main factor for the rejection rates. Some employees interpreted this to mean that the real gender gap problem was a pipeline issue.Theres criticis m for the methodology of both studies. The female engineer didnt look at the previous jobs engineers might have held, while Facebook did not analyze the trend closely enough to rule out gender bias as a factor.But its clear that the engineers conclusion of women facing more scrutiny than menresonated with many engineers.Her analysis was brought up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an employee town hall. When asked about it, Zuckerberg acknowledgedthat gender bias was an issue.But its unclear if he means its a Facebook issue, or a general issue that affects the entire tech industry.Diverse teams make better decisionsFacebook has been called out for its lack of diversity before. Its Equal Employment Opportunity Filing for 2013 reportedthat there were no black people in executive or senior management roles.In its latest diversity report, women represented 17% of technical roles. This matters because engineers at Facebook build the infrastructure that all of the features we the public see are b uilt upon. Whatever life stories, biases, and perspectives they hold are embedded into the dinosaurier of the technology we use.As Sandberg herself has said about diversity Endless data show that diverse teams make better decisions. We are building products that people with very diverse backgrounds use, and I think we all want our company makeup to reflect the makeup of the people who use our products. Thats not true of any industry really, and we have a long way to go.