Female coders received 35 percent more “rejects” and 8.2 percent more comments on their code, the former Facebook engineer found. Facebook says it did its own internal analysis of its code review process in October, according to The Guardian:

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.

Both studies show that female engineers who work at Facebook may face gender bias that prevents their code from being accepted at the same rate as male counterparts, The Verge reported.

The studies raise questions about Facebook’s ongoing diversity efforts. The company’s workforce is 33 percent female, with women holding 27 percent of leadership positions and 17 percent of technical roles.

The former employee’s findings seemed to suggest that a female engineer’s work was more heavily scrutinized, according to The Verge. Findings by Facebook’s Parikh 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.)

A Facebook spokesperson said the company has already acknowledged “that representation of senior female engineers both at Facebook and across the industry is nowhere near where it needs to be,” the Guardian reported

Lori Goler, Facebook’s head of human resources, said that leaking internal conversations is counterproductive to improving diversity, the Guardian reported.

“A key factor in our ability to recruit more women in engineering is our recruiting brand,” Goler wrote in an internal communication. “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.”

Code written by women is actually more likely to be approved by fellow coders than code written by men – but only if the female coders hide their gender, according to a study by Github, the open source program-sharing service.