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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)

#81

Post by beej71 »

roguecoder wrote: post #26
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…

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.

This is also Top Gear's method of audience gender balance.

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

#82

Post by scotty79 »

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…

You live in a strange world Sir!

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

#83

Post by sequence7 »

cube13 wrote: post #43
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…

>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…

The limit of 50/50 doesn't guarantee an attendance of 50 women it just limits the attendance to 50 men, although it obviously doesn't guarantee that either. Personally I think it's a pretty useful message to say 'here are a number of ways that you can make your hackathon more appealing to women' but that's a very boring headline and it would never have hit the front page so I can understand why it wasn't used. The number of frankly misogynist (I don't mean yours or the parent posters) only heightens my belief that articles like this are useful. There are well known ways to entice men who spend time hacking to your hackathon such as beer, pizza etc. but if we want to broaden the appeal of coding/hacking/programming we need to broaden the appeal of the events that nurture such creativity.

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

#84

Post by anthonyb »

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.

I understand some people having trouble with reading comprehension, but.... that's the very first line of the post.

I'm not sure what the problem is with that, but getting 50 women to a hackathon, much less any event, is quite an achievement. Perhaps you should focus on that, rather than immediately poking holes?

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

#85

Post by anthonyb »

hamax wrote: post #38
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…

> a violation of evolutionary norms What king of bullshit is this?

Applying evolutionary theory to a computer programming event is a whole new kind of odd...

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

#86

Post by rada »

tomwalker wrote: post #62
ahelwer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my profession it is becoming predominantly female. If I was to advertise an all male study group, or limit an event to 50 percent fem ale, I would be called exclusionary or sexist I feel.

I just googled male vs. female percentages of UK doctors. Looks like the ratio is roughly 40% female to 60% male. In what alternate reality is that "predominantly female"? This whole save-the-men hysteria is getting out of hand.

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

#87

Post by sequence7 »

beej71 wrote: post #81
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.

This is also Top Gear's method of audience gender balance.

Top Gear's gender balance is specific to the studio audience. If you check you might notice that neither the contributors (presenters, production staff) nor the audience are anyway near as balanced so I don't really see your point.

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

#88

Post by tomwalker »

rada wrote: post #86
tomwalker wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my profession it is becoming predominantly female. If I was to advertise an all male study group, or limit an event to 50 percent fem ale, I would be called exclusionary or sexist I feel.

I just googled male vs. female percentages of UK doctors. Looks like the ratio is roughly 40% female to 60% male. In what alternate reality is that "predominantly female"? This whole save-the-men hysteria is getting out of hand.

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 the number of women has increased 10-fold."

http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=2...

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

#89

Post by UnFleshedOne »

stcredzero wrote: post #80
kaybe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By whom are they interrupted?

The wait staff and by others at the table. I think there's a subconscious perceived status thing that just makes interruption less likely for "white" men. Granted, this is just my perception. Data would be good. I should probably search the social psychology literature.

Interruption might be partly due to mismatch in visual cues. People look for non-verbal signs that a person stopped talking. Maybe those misfire because of cultural differences? If true, this should be especially pronounced in group conversations.

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

#90

Post by sequence7 »

kevinpet wrote: post #79
stcredzero wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't see the problem with this. If you wish, you can hold your own hackathon without 50/50 male:female enrollment.

> If you wish, you can hold your own hackathon without 50/50 male:female enrollment. When did I ever say anything critical of their limiting attendees? If they want to do that, that's their business. If they want to write a blog post about a bunch of tricks that might help your event be more inviting to women, that's great too. The problem is with representing the results as due to those tricks while ignoring the oth…

If I write a blog a post about how I got 50 billionaires to attend my hackathon then the techniques for attracting those billionaires might be considered useful, the fact I was restricting my hackathon to mainly billionaires doesn't negate the benefit of those techniques. So I can have two titles 'How I got 50 billionaires to attend my hackathon' or 'It's easy to get 50 billionaires to attend a hackathon just refuse anyone who isn't a billionaire'. The trick here isn't to limit attendees, that's easy, the trick is to encourage the attendees you would like to attend. If it's billionaires then you should definitely check out my upcoming series of blog posts on how I got 50 billionaires to attend my hackathon (possibly fictional), if it's women (who are massively underrepresented at hackathons, much like billionaires) then perhaps the linked article would be valuable.
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