“The numbers are a challenge,there are just fewer women graduating and fewer women in the industry. So I think there’s just a smaller pool of people and I think, because of that, if Facebook had gender parity, then everyone else in the industry wouldn’t, just statistically. So our first problem is not a Facebook problem, it’s an industry problem.” said Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer.at the She++ conference.
Most of Facebook’s senior management team shed light on Facebook’s aggressive strategy to recruit talented engineers to join their “deep bench” — the company’s greatest asset, “The numbers are a challenge,” Schroepfer explains. “There are just
fewer women graduating and fewer women in the industry. So I think there’s just a smaller pool of people and I think, because of that, if Facebook had gender parity, then everyone else in the industry wouldn’t, just statistically. So our first problem is not a Facebook problem, it’s an industry problem.”. Facebook aims to turn their attention to the “pipeline problem” and work to
increase the total number of software engineers in the world, namely by increasing the number of women.
“We put a lot of energy into trying to find more women, because fundamentally for us it’s an applicant pool problem,” Director of Engineering Jocelyn Goldfein says. “When women interview with us, we want to hire them and they want to work for us. Those numbers are great. The trouble is, there are just very few women we can find in the candidate pool.” If only they would also focus such opportunities to women in developing nations as well.
