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

21–30 of 118 posts

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

#21

Post by lgilchrist »

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.

That's not entirely accurate. We needed to control the number of attendees to accomodate the venue's space constraints. We set aside 100 tickets, 50 male and 50 female. The male tickets sold out first, then the women's. We then opened up the waitlist in batches as people changed their RSVPs.

Eventbrite made this pretty confusing, as you can't waitlist more than 1 type of ticket (e.g. we couldn't waitlist male and female tickets). We'll come up with a better system for the next one.

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

#22

Post by ufo »

cletus wrote: post #19

Is it just me or does all this talk about women in tech and efforts to balance things out (artificially) just devalue what good work women engineers are doing? It's the classic affirmative action problem: if you lower the bar for one group in the eyes of everyone else members of that group are viewed as having less merit regardless of whether or not its true. I'm all for having more good female engineers because I'm…

The problem with the Grace Hooper example is that she is from back when programming was still considered a "secretarial" and "womanly" profession. Software Engineering has become a more male-dominated since then and the percentage of women has gone down.

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

#23

Post by ceol »

cletus wrote: post #19

Is it just me or does all this talk about women in tech and efforts to balance things out (artificially) just devalue what good work women engineers are doing? It's the classic affirmative action problem: if you lower the bar for one group in the eyes of everyone else members of that group are viewed as having less merit regardless of whether or not its true. I'm all for having more good female engineers because I'm…

> Is it just me or does all this talk about women in tech and efforts to balance things out (artificially) just devalue what good work women engineers are doing?

It's just you. No one is asking to accept sub-par work.

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

#24

Post by Androsynth »

lgilchrist wrote: post #21
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.

That's not entirely accurate. We needed to control the number of attendees to accomodate the venue's space constraints. We set aside 100 tickets, 50 male and 50 female. The male tickets sold out first, then the women's. We then opened up the waitlist in batches as people changed their RSVPs. Eventbrite made this pretty confusing, as you can't waitlist more than 1 type of ticket (e.g. we couldn't waitlist male and fem…

So what youre saying is that its entirely accurate?

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

#25

Post by lgilchrist »

Androsynth wrote: post #24
lgilchrist wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not entirely accurate. We needed to control the number of attendees to accomodate the venue's space constraints. We set aside 100 tickets, 50 male and 50 female. The male tickets sold out first, then the women's. We then opened up the waitlist in batches as people changed their RSVPs. Eventbrite made this pretty confusing, as you can't waitlist more than 1 type of ticket (e.g. we couldn't waitlist male and fem…

So what youre saying is that its entirely accurate?

What I'm saying is that it wasn't ideal and we'll try to do it better next time around.

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

#26

Post by roguecoder »

lgilchrist wrote: post #21
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.

That's not entirely accurate. We needed to control the number of attendees to accomodate the venue's space constraints. We set aside 100 tickets, 50 male and 50 female. The male tickets sold out first, then the women's. We then opened up the waitlist in batches as people changed their RSVPs. Eventbrite made this pretty confusing, as you can't waitlist more than 1 type of ticket (e.g. we couldn't waitlist male and fem…

I wasn't disagreeing with what you said here. What I was suggesting is that you got 50/50 balance by a technique you didn't mention in your blog post: limiting male enrollment as a percentage of the whole. I don't think there is anything wrong with that, but it is unlikely that someone doing only the things you mentioned in your post would achieve the same gender balance you got by doing something else all together.

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

#27

Post by MartinCron »

cletus wrote: post #19

Is it just me or does all this talk about women in tech and efforts to balance things out (artificially) just devalue what good work women engineers are doing? It's the classic affirmative action problem: if you lower the bar for one group in the eyes of everyone else members of that group are viewed as having less merit regardless of whether or not its true. I'm all for having more good female engineers because I'm…

This isn't as much about "lowering the bar" affirmative-action-style as much as removing the "no girlz allowed!" sign from the clubhouse.

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

#28

Post by lgilchrist »

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?

sure, having four devs organize this event would have been nice for credibility, but they wouldn't have necessarily throw a better hackathon just by being devs.

there's a learning curve to throwing good hackathons, just like with anything else. we talked to a ton of people before this event, including devs and other hackathon organizers, read every best practice we could find, and solicited a lot feedback from our attendees. sure, we made some mistakes (demos need to be queued up a la TC, peoples choice award needs to be fail-safe), but we'll fix them moving forward.

what would you have done differently?

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

#29

Post by roguecoder »

cletus wrote: post #19

Is it just me or does all this talk about women in tech and efforts to balance things out (artificially) just devalue what good work women engineers are doing? It's the classic affirmative action problem: if you lower the bar for one group in the eyes of everyone else members of that group are viewed as having less merit regardless of whether or not its true. I'm all for having more good female engineers because I'm…

It is just you: empirical evidence finds that balancing things out artificially increases participation without affecting performance. See, for example, http://www.tirol.gv.at/fileadmin/www.tirol.gv.at/themen/gese...

This isn't a quality problem: it is a cultural problem. There are enough high-quality women programmers out there to have 50/50 gender balance (obviously). It does not usually happen because of self-perpetuating social dynamics.

I notice you are only in favor of interventions that don't require you to do anything. What if overcoming bias required you, and everyone like you, to take a step back and create space where women can participate? Would you be willing to forgo participation in a hackathon to an equally-qualified women so that the other women would find it a more welcoming space?

I would, because the comfort of more-than-one woman is more important to me than my own participation. If I don't have a hackathon to participate in I can always start one of my own; I don't need to see participation as a zero-sum competition with the women and men around me.

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

#30

Post by tomwalker »

lgilchrist wrote: post #21
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.

That's not entirely accurate. We needed to control the number of attendees to accomodate the venue's space constraints. We set aside 100 tickets, 50 male and 50 female. The male tickets sold out first, then the women's. We then opened up the waitlist in batches as people changed their RSVPs. Eventbrite made this pretty confusing, as you can't waitlist more than 1 type of ticket (e.g. we couldn't waitlist male and fem…

Isn't that sexist?
Post reply on HN