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

lgilchrist.com

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

#51

Post by papsosouid »

nicolethenerd wrote: post #50
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?

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".

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

#52

Post by roguecoder »

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…

It was organized by women. I presume that if she wanted babies she would have them. Sperm is not that expensive.

Programmers who happen to be women are coworkers, not baby-making machines. Your attitude is so wrong I don't even know where to start, except to suggest that you clearly don't understand emergence, evolution or humanity.

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

#53

Post by ReadEvalPost »

papsosouid wrote: post #51
nicolethenerd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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".

I wish I were surprised that this sort of hostility is only shown when attracting women is one of the main goals of an event.

But I'm not. I'm not.

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

#54

Post by aleyan »

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…

Would it be fair to say that this approach for achieving gender balance can thus be summarized as: "quotas"?

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

#55

Post by jlees »

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…

I'm female and I believe this is true to some extent, but that the good work done by women engineers and women in tech groups outweighs it.

It is hard going to an event and wondering if people think I was invited for free because I'm a woman. Going to a hackathon and having people believe I'm a designer on sight. Having people nod their heads understandingly when I mention I'm a PM, not a full time engineer (any more).

It's rare, but once you get a touch of the impostor syndrome it's very hard to shake. I'd believe rationally that 90% of the people at one of these events would be ready to embrace me for my abilities and not care about my gender. The people I work with certainly do an outstanding job of that. I've just had enough odd comments and sceptical looks that I believe there's a grain of truth to the paranoia.

On the flipside, the last Startup Weekend I went to was SWEDU, where I worked with two other female iOS engineers, a female marketer and a male teacher to pull out an awesome iOS learning game in less than 54 hours. So.. good things do happen. :)

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

#56

Post by itisfritz »

ahelwer wrote: post #44
alphamerik wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what makes your world view correct, by your definition and man who would not have sex with another man is sexist.

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

#57

Post by picardo »

I was at this hackathon. Sure, if you micromanage every single aspect of the event, you're going to achieve what you set out, but getting people to hack together over a weekend does not create a culture in which men and women can collaborate and work together after the event is over.

Specifically, as a guy, I found some of the marketing material distributed at the event pretty offputting. Most of the stuff was color-coded, either pink or blue, and that was the first weird thing. Why would you reinforce the traditional gender roles like this if you are truly trying to change them?

Second, I didn't keep the materials, but as I recall there was one that was making the suggestion that "every fairy tale starts this way." Well, maybe, but that suggestion is not really welcome in a professional setting. I wonder if that's the right approach to encourage guys to start taking women seriously in the work setting.

Bottomline, the motivation of the event is commendable, and I am all for adding more women to the technology sector, but adding sex into the promotion of a hackathon, and so badly, will not get us there.

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

#58

Post by roguecoder »

aleyan wrote: post #54
lgilchrist wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would it be fair to say that this approach for achieving gender balance can thus be summarized as: "quotas"?

Even quotas won't generate participants where there are none. I would presume this success can be attributed to "all of these suggestions, plus quotas."

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

#59

Post by kevinpet »

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…

The fact that you gave preference to women makes your whole blog post utter bullshit. You could have written a very good blog post about "our hackathon was better because we ensured it wasn't dominated by men" and it could have been true. But instead you wrote a blog post about these little tricks that might help a little bit, but are likely completely dominated by turning away men.

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

#60

Post by stcredzero »

heretohelp wrote: post #35
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) That hasn't been true since the 60s.

It was meant in the specific context of holding hackathons.
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