New report accuses Facebook of gender bias in its engineering department

Facebook is being accused of gender bias in its engineering department, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The claims come from a unnamed woman who says she previously worked as an engineer for Facebook and spent the past year studying what was happening at the company.

In her findings, she said that female-authored code was rejected 35 percent more often from other Facebook employees than the work that was done by males. Female engineers, on average, also apparently have to wait 3.9 percent longer their submitted code to approved, with their work seeing  8.2 percent more scrutiny from superiors.

After he discovered this information, Jay Parikh, head of infrastructure, is said to have commissioned his own study. In it, he reportedly determined that code rejections were determined by rank of employee, not gender.

A spokesperson for Facebook told The Wall Street Journal that the female employee’s initial study was “incomplete and inaccurate.”

Further statements given to other outlets like TechCrunch and The Verge also blamed the data rejection on seniority, not gender. “[This] 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,” Facebook told outlets via e-mail.

According to a report last month from Business Insider, 33 percent of overall Facebook employees are female, with 27% being in leadership roles.

Facebook has been accused of sexism in the past, such as in this scathing report by an alleged former employee.

Image credit: Pixabay

Source: The Wall Street Journal 

Via: Engadget