
How to Get More Women in Tech: Lessons from a Hackathon in Gaza - dianacbiggs
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/585178e8e4b0320ed05a9a58
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imontauk
Thanks for sharing!

Two points I'd underscore: it's important to take risks to reach the
inclusivity goals the organization sets, and a few individuals can make a huge
difference in that commitment.

I was the leader at Gaza Sky Geeks when we decided to bring our women's
participation rates to 50%. Part of what we did was require 50% women's
participation at our main outreach event (a Startup Weekend at the time).
That's the top of the funnel - whatever our women's engagement rate is at that
stage, it'll either stay the same or drop after that (if there's bias at each
selection stage against women, as founders enter incubation, then
acceleration, then follow-on investment)

Some of our staff and partners disagreed with this strategy: only 30% of
applicants to the outreach event were female, and their applications were
indeed often worse than men's applications. Quite honestly, the main reason we
stuck to the goal was because I put my foot down and said Gaza Sky Geeks would
only run the event if we all committed to 50% women's participation.

What happened next? Women outperformed men at the event, winning most of the
prizes. That was all organic - and if anything, we had expected the judges to
be biased towards men.

The following year, we again had the same debate with our partners and our
team, and again I stood my ground for this.

That's explained in this video:
[https://youtu.be/vJnRy8jcac8](https://youtu.be/vJnRy8jcac8) ("How Gaza's
startup community became one of the most female-inclusive in the world")

~~~
ksenzee
This is fascinating. If you had fewer women to choose from, and their
applications were often worse, you were arguably "lowering the bar" in the
name of diversity. And yet you ended up with better results in the end. Do you
think that's because the skills needed for a good application weren't the same
as the skills needed for performing well at the event? Or was it a team-based
competition, and you ended up with mixed teams that therefore performed
better? Obviously you've thought a lot about it, so I'm interested in whether
you've come to a conclusion.

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exstudent2
I don't understand how they can say "Ultimately, our goal is egalitarianism"
and yet point #1 is "Make Women a Priority". Targets, arbitrary quotas, not
holding events if 50% of the participants aren't female... does not sound like
egalitarianism to me.

~~~
dang
Oh no. Not again.

This generic objection is automatically off-topic on HN [1]. We've all heard
it a zillion times, and we all know everything that comes next. What about
nurses! What about coal miners! Why aren't there diversity efforts for
preschool teachers! Well, there are! Well fuck you! You're a sexist, no you're
the sexist. Yawn, yawn, snooze. Those of you who actually want to replay this
discussion, please find a different corner of the internet to enjoy
yourselves. The rest of us want respite from the tedium.

1\. This is well covered by the HN guideline that says: "Please avoid
introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to
say about them."
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
exstudent2
Well, I _did_ support the moratorium on political posts but it got reversed
and here we are again. As long as posts like this hit the front page you
should expect people to point out inconsistencies in message.

~~~
dang
This has nothing to do with the experiment we tried on political posts. It has
to do with the outright ban on pointless repetition.

People come here to have their intellectual curiosity satisfied, and there
stopped being anything new in any of this a long time ago. The way I see it,
the options are: (1) would we like to be both bored and blared at? or (2)
neither. On behalf of the community, I choose "neither".

~~~
exstudent2
I also tire of seeing the repetitive "let's get more X into tech!". I've
quoted the article not raised points out of thin air.

