A former Facebook engineer claims her old employer disproportionately favored code written by men compared to woman, but the social networking giant is refuting the basis of that allegation.
The female employee, who reportedly spent several years with the Menlo Park-based company, conducted a data analysis and found that code created by female employees was "rejected much more frequently than code written by their male colleagues," the Wall Street Journal reported.
The analysis, which examined five years of data and was posted in September, specifically indicated that when female engineers submitted potential code, they were denied 35 percent more than male employees, according to the newspaper.
A Facebook spokesperson countered the reliability of the claim.
"As we have explained, the Wall Street Journal is relying on analysis that is incomplete and inaccurate – performed by a former Facebook engineer with an incomplete data set," a Facebook spokesperson said. "Any meaningful discrepancy based on the complete data is clearly attributable not to gender but to seniority of the employee. In fact, the 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.”
Following the release of the employee's analysis, Facebook conducted its own report and subsequently "attributed any gap in rejection rates to an engineer's rank, not gender," the newspaper reported.
Experts and former employees examined both reports submitted by Facebook and the female engineer. They found that both had flaws, according to the newspaper.
