No, I don't think so. We don't know what the recruiting funnel looks like at FB, but it is entirely possible that the hiring process has been designed by a group of engineers who, through their homogenous demographics, are either drawing on similarly-homogenous professional networks for references or selecting for characteristics they possess (which could be bad for anyone who's not like them).

Based on my own anecdotal experience with hiring developers, the m/f ratio is highly unbalanced before our own biases even come into play. A while ago, we had a recruiting agent helping us to find candidates, based solely on a list of technical criteria. She (yes, she) sent us almost only men, a dozen or two of them. The one exception was a woman who choked on the fizzbuzz test. That was actually really saddening.

Did these technical criteria skew towards mid-level or senior? I've observed this as well, but I've observed a more even balance of junior candidates.

If so, this could be a manifestation of the high attrition rates for experienced female engineers.

It's certainly an anecdote that could be interpreted that way. I think the main answer to things like these are always the same: a multi-pronged approach. Searching for a silver bullet for something as complex as human-human and human-society interactions is somewhat futile: usually we improve these by tackling it in as many ways as we can. I think diversity in hiring is similar, personally.

There have been plenty of folks who have proved this wrong. This is the classic "pipeline" argument, which is really just a case of the company restricting the "pipeline" through various practices.

There are plenty of posts out there about why Facebook's recent declaration that their numbers are that way due to the pipeline problem is wrong. There was a particularly good one I recall, but I can't find it sadly. But the other articles out there should suffice too.

There are also many self taught programmers out there, which are not affected by the "pipeline". Interview practices often subconsciously discriminate against them (for example, an overabundance of datastructure questions -- most self taught programmers I know are good enough with datastructures, but haven't become super awesome experts at them because that's not very useful when actually programming. Focusing your interviews on solely these questions excludes nearly half the "pipeline").

The college I was in has an extremely skewed gender ratio. There are many companies out there that nearly exclusively hire from a set of similar colleges as a matter of prestige. And of course have a large gender diversity issue, which they (well, employees there -- in this country there is less of a push for diversity and companies don't make public statements about it) blame on the pipeline. This is absurd. What Facebook does is similar, though not as stark.

Yep, but this discussion creates a lot of projects targeting to improve these numbers in the future

Improve. Yes. I for one am going to lobby the government to provide early training for young women who might be interested in coal mining. Hopefully we can reduce the number of men in coal mining in favor of more disadvantaged groups who are less interested in back breaking labor.