Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too)

lgilchrist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–118 of 118 posts

Re: How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too)

#111

Post by papsosouid »

nicolethenerd wrote: post #61
papsosouid wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the fact that programmers don't go to "hackathons" that are 8 hours long, have no set purpose, and are run by marketing weasels who say things like "build awesome hacks".

"have no set purpose" - you can't code without somebody else handfeeding you a purpose? God forbid we hold an open-ended event and let the programmers decide what to build! And I'm sorry I didn't realize there was a minimum time limit for writing code to be considered "programming". Next time I only code for 8 hours, I'll be sure to remind everybody that it didn't really count. sigh Why do I poke at the trolls?

I didn't say there was a minimum time to be considered programming. I said "spend 8 hours doing something random" isn't a hackathon. "OpenBSD developers spending a week hacking on OpenBSD" is a hackathon.

Re: How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too)

#112

Post by yummyfajitas »

anthonyb wrote: post #94
yummyfajitas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this paper shows is that men compete just as hard even if you give preferences to women. It does not address the question of whether lowering the bar for some people will lower the overall average or the average for that subgroup (hint: it will - this is almost a mathematical identity).

Counter hint: It doesn't. Look at figure 4 in the paper. I suspect that the reason for this is that when you exclude women in general, you're also excluding women who are just as good as men are. Which is the unspoken assumption in your post and Cletus' original post: if you include more women, those women are going to be dolts who couldn't make it in on their own steam. I don't see that that's the case (eg. what if…

The paper did not lower the bar for entry, it lowered the bar for women winning. The correct test would be to compare the winners of the competition with the lower bar to the winners of the competition without the lower bar.

Which is the unspoken assumption in your post and Cletus' original post: if you include more women, those women are going to be dolts who couldn't make it in on their own steam.

The unspoken assumption is that lowering the bar has any effect at all. If the bar is normally at 10, but you lower it to 7 for women, then any extra women this policy lets in must be in the range [7,10). Since all numbers in the interval [7,10) are below the previous minimum, they therefore lower the average.

Re: How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too)

#113

Post by joeyduds »

roguecoder wrote: post #15

From what I understand, the hackathon itself was advertised from the start as "50 men/50 women". When 50 men signed up, they stopped accepting male applicants. So they did find 50 women that wanted to attend a hackathon, but they did it by leaving the door open for women to attend when otherwise the entire hackathon would have filled up with men. Not mentioning that approach in their blog post seems ... disingenuous.

Lots of events work this way...take the Boston Marathon, for example, which has more forgiving qualifying times for women to ensure that it's not overly-male dominated.

Re: How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too)

#114

Post by tomwalker »

rada wrote: post #92
tomwalker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my cohort of 12 individuals, 4 are male. This is not unusual unless you do surgery. "Looking at the figures shows that the picture is unambiguous. Not only are women doctors to outnumber their male counterparts in the UK by 2017, in general practice this will happen in the next four years. Entry data from medical schools show that over the past four decades the number of men entering medicine has doubled whereas t…

In my cohort of 12 individuals, 4 are male. And in my chair, 100% of mobile engineers are female. Woo hoo. Now let's move on to your article. So much material there, where to begin! We are feminising medicine. It has been a profession dominated by white males. What are we going to have to do to ensure it retains its influence? Oh no, what are we going to do to ensure that medicine remains dominated by white males?! T…

I am not saying that we should ensure that white males dominate anything.

I just believe that there should be NO discrimination whether positive or negative.

People should get a position based on their merit. If it ends up that a profession is all male or all female, so be it.

I would never spout a ridiculous angle such as 'child minders are predominantly female so lets make it easier for a male to get the job'.

Re: How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too)

#115

Post by jaems33 »

fearfries wrote: post #104
jaems33 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many other demographics in tech that are also under-represented. African American men. Latinos. Heck, even though Asians are highly represented in engineering/comp-sci at top tech schools in the U.S. very few are in leadership positions in major North American tech companies. Every week on Twitter or HN I see great stories about people trying to advance women's presence in tech. I don't disagree with tha…

well, these guys seem to be casting a pretty wide net for disenfranchised subgroups. Probably not a perfect solution, but... http://www.npr.org/2012/07/23/156555402/silicon-valley-boot-...

Thanks for the piece. Reading the comments made me cringe.

Re: How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too)

#116

Post by adrr »

fearfries wrote: post #103
adrr wrote: post #12

Awesome a hackathon that is run by a product person(blog owner), marketing/pr woman, banking analyst and one front end dev. Where do I sign up?

It seems like you're being sarcastic, since the hackathon took place in the past and, therefore, signing up is no longer a possibility. Despite the exhaustive observations you surely made while not attending the event, I find your insinuation that only teams of back end developers have the qualifications required to organize hackathons to be facile and, frankly, untenable. I think that the founders came from heteroge…

Hackathon is about technology not about building products. The cancer that has infected the tech industry has bastardized the word. Prototyping something with bootstrap, rails and sqllite is now a hackathon and focus is more on design than technology. I bet there were more designers,marketers, product people than devs at this hackathon. Afterward the demos are built, the cancer(marketing/pr/sales/product people) will ask the developers to build the real product and offer such awesome terms like working for free for two months and getting 5% in RSUs.

Developers need to learn, they don't need these leaches. If you're the original developer and not getting over 30% of the equity, you're getting fucked.

Re: How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too)

#117

Post by roguecoder »

tomwalker wrote: post #114
rada wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my cohort of 12 individuals, 4 are male. And in my chair, 100% of mobile engineers are female. Woo hoo. Now let's move on to your article. So much material there, where to begin! We are feminising medicine. It has been a profession dominated by white males. What are we going to have to do to ensure it retains its influence? Oh no, what are we going to do to ensure that medicine remains dominated by white males?! T…

I am not saying that we should ensure that white males dominate anything. I just believe that there should be NO discrimination whether positive or negative. People should get a position based on their merit. If it ends up that a profession is all male or all female, so be it. I would never spout a ridiculous angle such as 'child minders are predominantly female so lets make it easier for a male to get the job'.

Merit has little to do with social choices, though. Just look at how often "cultural fit" comes up in discussions of hiring.

You are imagining an idealized utopia. The problem is, we don't live there. Unless hiring is done purely through objective tests that have been tested for bias and normalized there will be social-status factors involved. Coping with those lets us get much closer to a merit-based world than pretending they don't exist.

Imagine you had some code but a system-level round function was broken: it rounded up on 4-9 and down on 0-3. You can't change the function without changing the entire operating system. Would the best approach be to say, "I don't think we should discriminate! Round functions should behave correctly!"? Or would it be to compensate for the known flaws while working to change the system-level issues?

Re: How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too)

#118

Post by roguecoder »

jaems33 wrote: post #48
ixacto wrote: post #37

Change the genders and you see how fucking ridiculous it is. 'How we got 50 men to go to our [stereotypically female activity]. Have fun with stereotyping yourselves... "Feed People Well: Offer vegetarian-friendly options, salad, fruit, and wine in addition to the usual beer/pizza/redbull. We got at least a dozen thank-you’s specifically for having fruit with breakfast. Everyone likes healthy food – so why not go the…

There are so many other demographics in tech that are also under-represented. African American men. Latinos. Heck, even though Asians are highly represented in engineering/comp-sci at top tech schools in the U.S. very few are in leadership positions in major North American tech companies. Every week on Twitter or HN I see great stories about people trying to advance women's presence in tech. I don't disagree with tha…

I have seen a few on Hacker's News but, like gender posts, they get flagged off the front page uber-quick.

The problem, and why I ignored your comment here to start with, is that you phrase is as "yes, but..." "Yes, that's bad, but why aren't you focusing on this totally different thing!?!" That's a form of derailing, especially when you suggest that those things are important because of how they affect men, rather than that both African-American men and women may face additional challenges entering our industry.

A positive way to engage in this specific effort, and thus not derail, might be to ask the organizer, "was there any difference in the demographics of this relative to other hackathons in terms of race? I am curious if the inclusiveness had any spillover effect."

That way, instead of changing the subject you are deepening your engagement with the topic at hand. If you would like people to instead stop talking about this post and talk about something different, you will probably have much better luck posting a different article where such conversations wouldn't be off-topic and derailing.

Post reply on HN