Facebook took heat for not having a 50/50 male/female workforce, when that is not the ratio of male to female devs available. They hire more females, based on the fact they are female. The code quality of some of these hires was not good, because they were not hired on merit, and they've created a code quality problem.

that's not quite the cobra effect. For that the number of female developers would need to have been reduced and not code quality.

You're making a lot of assumptions there. Do you have any evidence that they lowered the bar? Also, aren't they hiring kids straight out of college in droves? How do you go about properly assessing "merit"? Isn't that a bit of an unsolved problem in hiring?

To me the whole thing just raises a bunch of questions that don't have any satisfying answers.

You can still lower the bar below "hiring straight out of college in droves".

Hiring more self taught and bootcamp people is often advocated as a way to increase diversity, and a lot of roles don't require a college degree (plus a lot of self taught and bootcamp folks are very good). However, on a large enough dataset, they will be weaker candidates. So if you use those sources to improve diversity, you'll end up with a correlation between diverse hires and more junior devs. Which screws up with every other metrics you'll look at.

I'm not sure you're going to correct the perceived gender/racial/whatever imbalances if you start hiring self-taught programmers and bootcamp grads in droves, just looking at the typical demographics of the people that self-select into those cohorts.

there's actually quite a few bootcamps and social programs to help minorities break into the field, actually.

If the bar is the same, but there are fewer female applicants than male applicants, then there will necessarily be fewer females accepted (assuming standards are applied equally).

Until the number of women in our field are on par with men, efforts to create an artificial balance will mean lowering the bar.

This assumes that a job opening has a perfect distribution of applicants. Let's take another hypothetical;

Bob's factory posts machinist ads on Craigslist. CL turns out to send Bob 90% males and 10% females. Bob decides to try to increase the number of females he hires, and advertises on a second site. Turns out this site is viewed by a higher percentage of females, and thus his number of female applicants increases, and the bar for hiring stays the same.

> If we assume that group A and group B have the same average skill level

This assumption, on which your argument rests, is invalid.

I'm an engineering college student who's had conversations on this subject with admissions officers at my school. The gender ratio of accepted students is much more balanced than the gender ratio of applicants. Every year, the admissions department fields complaints from upset male applicants who were rejected; they feel that they were done a disservice because "the bar was higher" for them than for the female applicants. They point to the different acceptance rates for men and women as proof of this "lower bar" for women.

In reality, according to my school's admissions officers, the average female applicant is significantly stronger than the average male applicant. There exists, apparently, a huge volume of unqualified male applicants, who inflate that "80%" figure despite having no real chance at earning a position. We're talking SAT scores hundreds of points below the typical admitted student, no actual engineering experience, things like that. (I have heard that large companies like Texas Instruments also have this problem, which is why they place restrictions on which specific degrees applicants can have - to filter out that chaff.)

These men remain in the applicant pool where women would've washed out, the admissions officers at my school hypothesize, because it is easier for women to "give up" on STEM fields at the first sign of trouble due to social / societal pressures. Incompetent men, however, can think they're good at STEM more or less forever.

A more reasonable conclusion to draw, instead of "Facebook's male engineers are more skilled than their female engineers", would be the one that is presented in the article by the people who have the data. Namely, that this statistic arises from the confounding effect of seniority: Facebook's more senior engineers tend to be male, since the drive to hire more women has been more recent, and more senior engineers have code accepted more often.

I like your non-bigoted explanation, I wouldn't have expressed it in such a way.

its even more troubling then that. When faced with stiffer ability to get interviews (let alone offers), we practice a ton more to increase our hard skills. more practice does tend to lead to being more proficient at something. my female friends generally got 5-10 interviews a week. me, not so much

I was going to elaborate in my original post, but I like my upvotes.

I believe they meant this in the context of popular gender gap solutions.

More specifically, the situation where pressure is put on teams to weigh gender as more important than skill in the hiring process to bring teams to gender-parity. The result of this is female employees submitting worse code. This isn't because women are inherently any worse at writing software than men are, it's simply that the employer has a smaller pool of talent to pick from.

They wanted more women. Dropped the hiring bar for female devs. Got more mediocre devs. Those got bad reviews. Then they blamed it on sexism, which reduced the women willing to go into tech even more.

-- edit --

I don't know if it went that way or not, it's just an explanation on how their problem would map to the cobra effect.

Women are more likely to get hired to solve the unequal distribution of female/male engineers. This makes it more likely to have less qualified female engineers, and more qualified male engineers, since hiring requirements for men are more strict. A higher average of under qualified females compared to under qualified male engineers will lead to more code getting reject from the female counterpart.

This is also a biased assumption that women are worse developers... seems a little quick to jump to that conclusion.

Not necessarily. If the pool of talent is exactly the same(let's say 1000 women and 1000 men) and your interviewing process is perfect at determining engineer quality, but you are hiring 80 women and 20 men, then you'll hire the top 2% of men and the top 8% of women. Again, just assuming that the talent is exactly the same, the women you've hired will still be worse.

In reality, the pool of female talent is very shallow. Again assuming the talent levels are exactly the same, there's just not enough highly-skilled women to go around, e.g. if you're trying to hire the top 1% of engineers, and you have a pool of 1 million men and 100,000 women, then you're looking at 10000 men and 1000 women as your potential hires. If the top 1000 women are already taken, then you're forced to relax your interview requirements for women. In fact, if the pool is completely free for your usage, but you're looking to hire 10000 men and 10000 women, you'll be hiring the top 1% of male talent and down to the top 10% of female talent, which should lead to a difference in output.

This doesn't mean that "sexism" isn't real or that it's not a problem women face in the workplace. The question however, is how to measure the effectiveness of "anti-sexism" practices employed, if you cannot measure the effect of "sexism" itself, as it is entangled with all the other, confounding factors. You can't optimize performance if you can't measure the effects your solutions have on it.

the onus shouldn't be on multinationals to hire 50/50 gender, but on smaller companies that need lower skills and can accommodate junior roles.

or maybe multinationals should be honest about hiring juniors, and think that would be good PR for them rather than just let people use their staff as a statistic.

That wasn't said.

There are certainly good and bad developers no matter what gender.

If you have stricter hiring policies for men and e.g. only the top 10% of male candidates land a job while the less strict hiring procedures for females get the top 40% females a job, then you created an imbalance in skills between the genders in your company (and only there), and this is what might have happened here

and the strict hiring process for men is bad for women in the long run.

No, there's no biased assumption that women are worse developers, just one about relative numbers and relative skill distribution.

If the number of qualified female developers is less than the number of qualified male developers, then any company which manages to achieve hiring parity has either lowered the qualifications it demands from women developers, or increased the incentives it offers to them relative to other firms (enabling it to capture a higher share of high-skill female developers). Since the latter approach is obviously discriminatory and quite possibly illegal (not to mention a blatant violation of the principle of equal pay for equal work), the former is more likely.

The result of the former is that the median female developer at that company will have lower skill than the median male developer at the same company, even if women in the population at large have the same or better development skill.

The incentive strategy could enable a firm to secure the best female talent, but besides the ethical and legal implications it would also make things much worse for all the other firms out there: the best female talent being off the market, those firms would be forced to either settle for lesser-skilled women or accept a disproportionate share of male developers, neither of which would be appealing.

Naturally, increasing the supply of women developers to match that of male developers (or reducing the supply of male developers …) would improve the situation, but that's a horse of a different colour.

Not at all. If the skill requirement is lower for women to get into the same position as men, is it not rational that, on average, those women will perform poorer than the men?

Imagine they did the same thing for university entrance: men need all prerequisite courses and a 3.8gpa, whereas women need only 75% of prereqs and a 2.9gpa. It only makes sense that the women are going to score lower in exams/flunk out, since their initial starting point was, on average, further behind.

It's more like... if 1 good female developer gets a CS degree for every 10 good male developers, you would expect the workforce to be 10% female. However, if you artificially force 50% female representation you'll have to start drawing upon bad female developers since the rate of good developers is currently only 10%. You first have to increase the output of good female developers from schools before you can scale up their representation in the workforce, not the other way around.

one might say that "you have to increase the means of production"

"(...) However, Facebook employees now speculate that Parikh’s findings mean female engineers might not be rising in the ranks as fast as male counterparts who joined the company at the same time, or perhaps that female engineers are leaving the company more often before being promoted."

> Code rejected due to rank

> Women are of lower rank than men

> We need to promote more women faster

Facebook is about to get a taste of their own medicine.