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)

#91

Post by roguecoder » Mon, Jul 23, 2012, 11:58 PM UTC

jholman wrote: post #75

roguecoder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

So, it's not at all clear that there are, in fact, enough high-quality female programmers to have a 50/50 split in the field at large, which is clearly the important point. But I really started this comment to pick a few minor nits. So feel free to ignore the entire comment. 1) They didn't achieve 50%, actually, even with all that work. 2) 127 * 0.22 = 28% . Assuming your industry estimates are correct, you're going…

2) It's 227*0.22; you still get the original 100% too. If it were 27% oversubscribed you'd get 28%.

3) It is an assumption, though one that fits with my experience of hackathons (they tend to be 15-20% women.) I wasn't saying it's guaranteed that women will want to attend, just that there are qualified women who could.

4) Department of Labor, 2009 numbers: http://www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-databook-2009.pdf Page 29.

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

#92

Post by rada » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 12:03 AM UTC

tomwalker wrote: post #88

rada wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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?!

There is a tsunami of women coming through.

Aaaaahhh... TSUNAMI! SOMEONE GET THE LIFEBOATS! Nope, doesn't sound hysterical at all.

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

#93

Post by Torgo » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 12:11 AM 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…

There are a lot of assumptions made in your posting, and I think you should subject every one of them to honest skepticism.

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

#94

Post by anthonyb » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 12:13 AM 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).

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 they just don't want to participate in crap hackathons where they're going to be harassed?). Neither you or Cletus are providing anything other than the usual hearsay.

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

#95

Post by stcredzero » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 12:21 AM UTC

UnFleshedOne wrote: post #89

stcredzero wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not all of it. There are clear interruptions of the person talking by the wait staff.

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

#96

Post by anthonyb » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 12:37 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #78

roguecoder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Who said anything about lowering the bar for anyone? Cletus, in the post you replied to. As for using gender as a predictor in admissions, you'd also need to penalize high scoring women (and reward the low scoring ones). I have no particular objection to any of this. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/08/variance-induce.html

Mean SATs, not their variance. I don't think that overcomingbias link is really adding anything to the discussion.

The paper that roguecoder referenced is just pointing out that SAT scores are not a perfect predictor, and adjusting the intake based on gender is probably a good idea if you want to maximise the real effect (academic performance), rather than the predictor (SAT scores).

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

#97

Post by notJim » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 1:09 AM UTC

picardo wrote: post #57

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-…

I was there, too, and I came away with different impressions. A big part of hackathons is meeting other devs and sharing product/project ideas. Then if you find you like working with someone over the weekend, you're more likely to do so in the future. So it seems like having a hackathon where they reach out specifically to women would be very conducive to helping women feel more a part of the scene.

Their swag certainly had a blue and pink/red palette (see also their website: http://www.hacknjill.com/), but it wasn't color coded. They just handed out bags of stuff, and you got whatever happened to be in them. Similarly, the t-shirts had the logo and whatnot on them, but they were all the same design IIRC. The color palette reminds me of an instagram photo, which fit with their hackyoursummer motif.

I don't remember that marketing line anywhere, and upon a cursory glance, I don't see it on their site, but even if it was, so what? Whimsy is commonplaces in marketing materials these days, and is definitely something you see in a light-hearted professional setting. This isn't a corporate-lawyer lawyer-a-thon where one would expect things to be staid, it's a casual hackathon.

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

#98

Post by notJim » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 1:15 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

Meanwhile, the group of people who got in thanks to affirmative action keep proving the nay-sayers wrong, and setting examples for people like them to follow them into the field.

You can't eliminate gender bias simply by removing barriers to entry. You have to actively encourage people to enter, otherwise they will never even consider it. The term of art here is “substantive equality” and I'd encourage you to Google it to read more arguments in favor and opposed to it.

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

#99

Post by notJim » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 1:20 AM UTC

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 was at this hackathon. I am sad to find out that I am not a programmer :(. My teammates will also be sad to find this news :( :(. I will inform my employer tomorrow and instruct them to do the same. It will be hard to make a living anymore since this has been my only profession, but I guess I will have to make do.

Thank you for sharing your insight and correcting my worldview!

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

#100

Post by anthonyb » Tue, Jul 24, 2012, 1:25 AM UTC

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.

Except that it's mentioned on the very first line:

> About a month ago, Hack’n Jill organized a hackathon with a simple goal: get 50 men and 50 women in a room to build something to improve their summers.