Facebook Becomes Target Of Gender Bias Accusations By Female Coders

Once again, gender discrimination rears its ugly head within the tech industry and this time, the target is Facebook. The biggest social media site in the world is being accused of having a bias against female coders, whose works apparently get rejected more often. This is coming from a survey conducted by the company, spurred by complaints by female engineers working for Facebook.

Gender discrimination is not a foreign issue in the tech industry. Practically every major company has been accused of it in some form or another. It’s just Facebook’s turn this time and boy does the data released by The Wall Street Journal make the social network look bad.

The publication basically revealed an internal company survey, where the work by female coders was supposedly rejected more often than those of their male counterparts. The documents also included details like the fact that Facebook’s female workforce is only 33 percent of the whole, with only 27 percent of the leadership roles held by women, which is being framed as a problem all of its own.

The bigger issue here would have to be the rejection of codes made by female engineers, which Facebook immediately took notice of. The company even had its head of infrastructure, Jay Parikh look into the matter. What he found was that the rejections had more to do with rank than gender, which leads to yet another hole since it indicates that women weren’t being given senior positions as often.

As The Verge points out, the rejections could also have something to do with increased scrutiny from male coders during the peer review process. It’s a possibility, but one without enough evidence to merit people jumping to conclusions.

For its part, Facebook confirmed Parikh’s findings but noted that the data was incomplete. As a result, it’s difficult to draw a definitive conclusion, though, this won’t stop some from making up their minds right now.