Female engineers who work at Facebook may face gender bias that prevents their code from being accepted at the same rate as male counterparts, according to internal company studies disclosed today by The Wall Street Journal. For Facebook, these revelations call into question the company’s ongoing diversity efforts and its goal to build overarching online systems for people around the globe. The company’s workforce is just 33 percent female, with women holding just 17 percent of technical roles and 27 percent of leadership positions. 
 
 The findings come in two parts. An initial study by a former employee found that code written by female engineers was less likely to make it through Facebook’s internal peer review system. This seemed to suggest that a female engineer’s work was more heavily scrutinized. 
 
 Facebook claims the issue is with rank, not gender 
 
 Facebook, alarmed by this data, commissioned a second study by Jay Parikh, its head of infrastructure, to investigate any potential issues. Parikh’s findings suggested that the code rejections were due to engineering rank, not gender. 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. Either possibility could result in the 35 percent higher code rejection rate for female engineers. (Facebook has eight engineering levels that determine hierarchy.) 
 
 When contacted by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook called the initial study “incomplete and inaccurate” and based on “incomplete data,” but did not shy away from confirming Parikh’s separate findings. That implies that, at the very least, one of the two situations is true: female employees have a harder time contributing to Facebook’s code base due to scrutiny from male colleagues, or that those employees are not obtaining higher ranking engineering roles that would allow for more code commits due to any number of factors. Facebook points to the lack of female engineers as an industry-wide issue that needs solving, and not something the company can remedy solely on its own. 
 
 Facebook’s new mission is to build a global community for everyone 
 
 Without access to the studies, we’re unable to verify the methodology or scrutinize the findings for further data points. However, the results suggest potential bias at Facebook most likely shared by most other major tech companies — a vast majority of which are predominantly male. 
 
 For Facebook, it’s troubling given CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision to construct the “social infrastructure” of a new global community, laid out clearly in a new manifesto he published in February. If only male programmers are helping shape the digital fabric of this online world, it runs the risk of excluding viewpoints and considerations important to half the human populace. 
 
 When questioned about the findings during a workplace Q&A session last week, Zuckerberg reportedly said gender bias was an “issue,” according to The Wall Street Journal. In a statement given to The Verge, Facebook stands by its analysis of the original study and defended Parikh’s findings: 
 
 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. 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. 
 
 Update 1:10PM ET, 5/2: Added statement from Facebook. 

 Tech company is disputing analysis that female engineers have code rejected 35% more than male engineers and said such leaks make it harder to hire women 
 
 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. 
 
 Facebook makes little progress in race and gender diversity Read more 
 
 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”. 
 
 In October, Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice-president of engineering, told engineers internally that the company had conducted its own analysis of the code review process “using confidential employee data so we could gain a better understanding of what is happening”. 
 
 The Facebook analysis took into account engineers’ “level” within the company and found “no statistically significant difference” between female and male engineers within the same level. 
 
 Parikh attributed the difference that the original analysis found to “the difference in gender distribution between levels”, meaning the fact that Facebook has more female engineers at lower levels than higher levels. 
 
 The Guardian was not able to review the underlying data or methodology for either study. A Facebook spokesperson said that the first study was “incomplete and inaccurate – performed by a former Facebook engineer with an incomplete data set”. 
 
 The spokesperson added: “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.” 
 
 Though both sets of data were shared internally at Facebook last year, they became a new topic of conversation at the company after today’s Wall Street Journal report. 
 
 
 
 Lori Goler, the head of human resources at Facebook, posted a confidential internal response to the report on Tuesday that was seen by the Guardian. Goler wrote that the company was “disappointed by many things related to this story, but mostly that there might be anyone who is not having the experience we would want everyone at Facebook to have”. 
 
 Goler also addressed the leaking of internal conversations at Facebook, arguing that they were counterproductive to improving diversity. 
 
 “A key factor in our ability to recruit more women in engineering is our recruiting brand,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, a story based on factually incorrect data that paints us in a negative light will almost certainly hurt our ability to attract more women, and it isn’t great for those of us working here, either. In other words, this moves us in the exact wrong direction.” 
 
 2016: the year Facebook became the bad guy Read more 
 
 Along with the rest of the tech industry, Facebook has been under internal and external pressure to improve its gender and racial diversity for years. The lack of diversity is most acute in technical and engineering roles. According to its most recent diversity report, 17% of technical employees at Facebook are women, while just 3% are Hispanic and 1% are black. 
 
 Discussions about gender in the tech industry often revolve around two questions: whether there are enough women in the “pipeline” to engineering jobs or whether women are actively or unconsciously discriminated against. 
 
 Last year, a study of coders on the open source repository GitHub found that code written by women was actually more likely to be approved by fellow coders than code written by men – but only if the female coders hid their gender. Female coders with profiles that made their gender “identifiable” had their code rejected more often than male coders. 
 
 In his October post, Parikh rejected the idea that Facebook should move to a blind code review process. 
 
 “As engineers, we might be tempted to build tools to deal with bias, but I don’t believe that this bias is easily addressed in mechanical ways,” he wrote. “Hiding the identity of authors or reviewers is counterproductive from an engineering perspective. Instead we should learn to recognize cases where reactions are affected by bias and move to correct them.” 

 Last year, a longtime engineer at Facebook Inc. gathered data that revealed a controversial finding: Code written by women was rejected much more frequently than code written by their male colleagues, according to people familiar with the matter and screenshots of internal discussions viewed by The Wall Street Journal. 
 
 For many female engineers at Facebook, the finding confirmed long-held suspicions that their coding faced more scrutiny than men’s. 
 
 ...
– An analysis of data—released internally at Facebook last September but made public by the Wall Street Journal this week—shows code written by female engineers is rejected 35% more often than code written by male engineers. They also wait 3.9% longer to get their code accepted and face 8.2% more questions and comments about it. The analysis was done by a female engineer who worked at Facebook for years. It highlights a lack of diversity within the company: Women occupy just 17% of technical roles at Facebook. The company is only 33% female overall, and only 27% of leadership positions are held by women, the Verge reports. A Facebook spokesperson says the employee's analysis was "incomplete and inaccurate." Followup analysis by Jay Parikh, Facebook's head of infrastructure, found the discrepancy in rejected code was based on engineers' rank, not gender. This wasn't necessarily a better finding, as it shows female engineers may not be getting promoted at the rate of their male colleagues. One employee calls the new analysis "deeply disturbing." Meanwhile, the Guardian reports Facebook's head of HR complained in an internal comment that the findings are hurting the company's "recruiting brand," making it harder to hire more women. When asked about the findings, Mark Zuckerberg admitted gender bias at Facebook is "an issue."