Facebook faces a gender bias debate, as studies find that the female engineers’ codes for the social media site was less likely to make it through the internal peer review system, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The sexist accusations made more sense to researchers as they found out that only 33% of the workforce is female, with only 27% having leadership roles.

The Head of Infrastructure, Jay Parikh, was alarmed by the gender data, so investigated any potential issues, and found that the code rejections were nothing to do with gender, but engineer ranking instead.

However, when The Wall Street Journal contacted Facebook, Facebook said that the initial study was wrong, because of the data being inaccurate and incomplete, yet confirmed that Parikh’s finding were correct.

“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,” says Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerbeg, according to The Verge.

“In fact, the discrepancy simply reaffirms a challege 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.”

Edited from source by Leah Alger

Source: The Verge