Facebook is disputing a former employee’s analysis that female engineers have their code rejected 35% more than male engineers, telling employees internally that leaking such information damages its “recruiting brand” and makes it harder for the company to hire women.
The original analysis, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and independently confirmed by the Guardian, was conducted by a longtime Facebook software engineer last year. The engineer studied the company’s code review process, looking at the number of times code was rejected, commented upon, or updated; how long it took for code to be accepted; and demographic data about the coder, such as gender and length of employment.
Female coders received 35% more “rejects” and 8.2% more comments on their code, the engineer found. The engineer also found that the disparity in rejections for male and female coders was “consistent across time at company”.
(emphasis mine)
We don’t care, we don’t have to … we’re Facebook.
“Damages its recruiting brand?” Seriously?
If Facebook thinks that this is the worst part of their being another outpost of “Bro Culture,” is that it damages their brand, then their moral compass is spinning fast enough to power all of Bayonne, New Jersey.
It’s no wonder that another publication described Facebook’s response as, “Incredibly tone-deaf.”
They are Facebook, they don’t care, they don’t have to.