Facebook, Heal Thyself.

The tech titans of Silicon Valley like to preach the gospel of political correctness. The great majority of them lean left and they firmly support diversity. That is, they support it everywhere but in their own shops.

As the proverb says: Physician, heal thyself. Apparently, the message has not made its way to Facebook, the tech behemoth whose Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg has become a crusader for gender equality in the workforce.

Apparently, she had too much time on her hands. So she set out to teach women to get what was rightfully theirs, by leaning in. She never considered that many women did not want to become like Sheryl Sandberg. And she did not imagine that her advice, which prescribes macho posturing, was as likely to cause trouble as to garner raises. Being assertive, aggressive and in everyone’s face incurs risks, especially for beings who are constitutionally weaker than their male counterparts. Besides, team players do not lean in. Being overly concerned about yourself does not often go down very well in a corporate environment. As articulated, it was bad advice.

One adds, as a point of interest, that the tech company that has made the greatest strides toward gender equity—Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo!—is being sued for discriminating against men in promotion practices. We do not know why Mayer failed to revive the struggling company she took over, but one suspects that other tech companies will not be rushing out to emulate her example, thus to hire and promote more women. And corporate boards in the future are likely to think twice about hiring a pregnant CEO.

Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook employees have discovered insidious forms of gender discrimination in their own ranks. The horror of it all.

Apparently, female coders do not receive the same level of respect as male coders.

The Journal explains:

Last year, a longtime engineer at Facebook Inc.FB 0.21% 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.

The results touched off a debate within Facebook over alleged gender bias among some of its most-valued employees: the engineers who build the features used by nearly two billion people every month.

What was causing this disgraceful sexist discrimination, which was happening under the nose of the ever-watchful Sandberg? How did she, great feminist icon that she has fashioned herself, not notice? Was she too busy promoting her books and crusading for the feminist cause?

Facebook was on the case. The company launched an investigation. It discovered:

In an internal post published a month later, Jay Parikh, Facebook’s head of infrastructure, attributed any gap in rejection rates to an engineer’s rank, not gender. Many employees interpreted this new analysis as a sign that female engineers weren’t rising at the same rate as men who joined the company around the same time.

The higher ranking engineers are mostly male. It was an Ah-ha! moment. The discrimination was even worse than they had imagined. Male engineers were getting promoted more than female engineers. The only rational conclusion, to the politically correct mind, was that this situation had been produced by sexist bigotry. Of course, one might also suggest that the best coders were getting promoted more than those whose work was of inferior quality. Or else, women might be spending less time writing code because they have pressing family obligations. Or else, some people might be better at coding than others. After all, the situation as Facebook is replicated throughout Silicon Valley. Are they all a bunch of sexist bigots? And how does it happen that their companies, rife with discrimination, are doing so well in the marketplace?

What if women do not want to code? What if women are less interested in engineering, as a course of academic study or a career? One recalls that women in college are more likely to major in subjects like art history and psychology while men are drawn toward engineering programs. Ought we not to respect the choices that women make, freely, one hopes, about their careers?

So, we are supposed to be astonished to read that code written by women at Facebook received 35% more rejections than code written by men. Did anyone ask whether the code written by women was as good or better or worse than the code written by men? Is gender the only relevant factor? If both men and women were doing the same coding for the same application, then we might have a fair comparison, but what company has two people doing the same job? Or else, the company can ask two executives to review the same code, telling them that one was written by a man and the other by a woman. Doubtless that would do wonders for company morale.

Also, the Facebook analysis also did not take into account an engineer’s relevant pre-Facebook experience. An engineer who had worked in the field for five years before coming to Facebook would probably be better than someone who was beginning a career at Facebook.

Facebook and the rest of Silicon Valley show what happens when deeply felt ideals run into reality. Either you sacrifice the company to your ideals or you paper over the problem with noble sentiments and calls for people to overcome their bigotry. We certainly would not want to think that all of these committed diversity-mongers are really just ordinary hypocrites? Would we?

James Freeman summed it up in a Wall Street Journal column on the topic:

From everything we’ve been told, there is absolutely no shortage of highly sensitive progressives at the social-media giant, and yet the organization doesn’t seem to be leaning in that far toward a more diverse workplace. There is of course an old-fashioned argument that an organization should simply seek to hire and promote employees based on the content of their character and their talent and forget about what people look like on the outside.