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> 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. |