How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too) • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by ahelwer » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 7:23 PM UTC

tomwalker wrote: post #30

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…

Isn't that sexist?

I'm curious, how do you believe that is sexist?

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

#42

Post by ahelwer » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 7:25 PM UTC

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…

Ah yes, the ol' gender swap trick. Because our culture exists in a vacuum, right?

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

#43

Post by cube13 » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 7:33 PM UTC

lgilchrist wrote: post #39

roguecoder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a fair point. I left it out of the blog post b/c it's a more complex issue that probably merits its own post. It seems there's only 2 ways to go when hosting an event -- open the floodgates or actively manage the attendee list. Because of space constraints, we had to go with the latter. Managing attendees isn't just about restricting male signups, as you say -- it's also about making sure there are enough desi…

>It seems there's only 2 ways to go when hosting an event -- open the floodgates or actively manage the attendee list. Because of space constraints, we had to go with the latter.

I don't think that roguecoder is saying that this was the issue. This is a perfectly valid decision, considering all the logistical realities and your stated goal. It colors the implied message that there was a 50% split in interest between men and women, which is what I get from the blog post(which I do realize that was not the intent).

Unfortunately, I think that the blog post is misidentifying the real success here. It wasn't that you got 50 women. Your signup strategy pretty much guaranteed this. The hackathon could have been an utter failure, but the original goal would have The real success is that not only did you have an even gender split, you still had a very successful hackathon. That alone takes more work than just throwing up the signup page and limiting the signups to ensure that the proper distribution is reached, and I think should be the takeaway here: That it doesn't matter whether it's a guy or a girl.

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

#44

Post by ahelwer » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 7:33 PM UTC

alphamerik wrote: post #40

ahelwer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I have to say this was a pretty disgusting comment. Didn't expect to see this on HN. If you start your post off with any variant of "from an evolutionary psychological standpoint" in a thread about sexism/feminist issues you need to seriously consider not clicking the "add comment" button. Also, look up "projection". I can honestly tell you that no, the reason I support women in tech is absolutely not so I can "…

Thanks for pointing this out, because between the multitude of posts in this forum and the posts which I responded to on the blog, I feel like I am taking crazy pills. What is the big deal here? Seems like so many of my peers have deep seated psychological problems (not like I don't, but damn).

Misogyny is unfortunately scarily prevalent. All we can do is call people out on it. If there isn't social backlash they'll never question their worldview.

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

#45

Post by roguecoder » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 7:38 PM UTC

ninetax wrote: post #33

roguecoder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-perp…

> There are enough high-quality women programmers out there to have 50/50 gender balance (obviously) Do you have a source for that?

I was referring to this specific hackathon, which obviously succeeded.

More generally, Computer Programmers as a whole are 22% women. Many hackathons where I am are wildly oversubscribed; any hackathon that is at least 127% oversubscribed should, if they have average gender representation for the profession, be able to have a 50/50 split. Since I've seen 2x or 3x oversubscription rates, that is not unreasonable.

If you include designers and business people, it takes even less oversubscription to get there. 29% of technical managers are women, along with 54.3% of designers.

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

#46

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 7:50 PM UTC

Jd wrote: post #31

From an evolutionary psychological standpoint I find this ridiculous: Traditional standpoint is that men go to places where women are (e.g. bars) and hit on them. This requires a combination of various skills on the part of men, including resource acquisition (to be able to buy drinks for women), social skills, and the ability to be aggressive in a non-threatening way (e.g. to approach an attractive woman and chat he…

[deleted]

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

#47

Post by papsosouid » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 7:55 PM UTC

It is pretty amazing to see how much the term "hackathon" has been diluted in such a short time. How did we go from a very literal "a hacking marathon" where the developers of project X get together to hack non-stop for a week on their project to "non-programmers scraping together some off the shelf javascript/css frameworks into a trivial web app for a couple of hours, and then having some marketing person call it an awesome hack"?

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

#48

Post by jaems33 » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 7:58 PM UTC

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 that movement at all. But I hear very few talking about the other subgroups in the male gender that may have obstacles from going into tech.

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

#49

Post by roguecoder » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 8:04 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #36

roguecoder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-perp…

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).

Who said anything about lowering the bar for anyone? There is no bar to attend most hackathons, no qualifying heats or even resume screening.

You also assume that lowering the bar inherently attracts less-qualified people than the marginal alternative participant. That is not true unless the outcome you care about is whatever bar you are using to measure and people accurately self-assess (or universally apply). For example, there is a 1992 study that found that SAT scores were equally good at predicting success of women and men, but only within those groups. Women performed as well during college courses as men with SAT scores 50 points higher (http://her.hepg.org/content/1p1555011301r133/). In such a case in order to maximize total academic performance, you would need to compensate for that systematic discrepancy and lower the SAT bar for women: what you are actually doing is normalizing the predicted-college-performance bar. That would not maximize total admitted SAT scores, but might maximize the outcome the college actually cares about.

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

#50

Post by nicolethenerd » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 8:07 PM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #47

It is pretty amazing to see how much the term "hackathon" has been diluted in such a short time. How did we go from a very literal "a hacking marathon" where the developers of project X get together to hack non-stop for a week on their project to "non-programmers scraping together some off the shelf javascript/css frameworks into a trivial web app for a couple of hours, and then having some marketing person call it a…

"Non-programmers?" Where are you getting that from?