
How We Got 50 Women to Our Hackathon (And You Can, Too) - lgilchrist
http://lgilchrist.com/how-we-got-50-women-to-our-hackathon/
======
roguecoder
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.

~~~
lgilchrist
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 female tickets). We'll come up
with a better system for the next one.

~~~
roguecoder
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.

~~~
lgilchrist
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 designers to developers,
beginners to experienced coders, and yes, men to women.

~~~
cube13
>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.

~~~
sequence7
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.

------
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.

~~~
notJim
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.

------
sp332
_Make the Attendee List Public_

Interesting, I have been told that (many) women prefer not to have their real
names published online especially not in connection with a particular real-
life event they are attending. It multiplies that amount of harassment they
are open to.

~~~
phon
In running similar events in the past, I have found adding a single checkbox
to the sign up form labeled 'Please include my name and contact information in
the official attendee list' is both simple and effective.

~~~
bryanlarsen
My gut reaction tells me that women are less likely to check that box than men
are -- is that your experience?

------
lbarrow
It's great to see that the list of changes to make does not include anything
enormous, ground-breaking or incredibly difficult. The author is basically
proposing a few subtle changes to the tone of the hackathon -- I'm glad to see
it had such a huge impact.

~~~
bwaldrep
There is no evidence that the huge impact was caused by these subtle changes.
It is far more likely that the even gender split was obtained by the ticket
quotas omitted in the original post.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4282226>

------
cletus
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 all for having more
good engineers (male or female). The counterargument seems to be that women
find the male dominance of tech intimidating or engineering careers aren't
presented to women as possibilities. If there is gender bias is
science/engineering/maths classes or with career guidance and so forth then
I'm all for eliminating that.

But as far as the first goes, I have two words for you: Grace Hopper.

~~~
roguecoder
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...](http://www.tirol.gv.at/fileadmin/www.tirol.gv.at/themen/gesellschaft-
und-soziales/frauen/downloads/frauenfoerderung_wirkt_-_Studie_2012.pdf)

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-perpetuating social dynamics.

I notice you are only in favor of interventions that don't require you to do
anything. What if overcoming bias required you, and everyone like you, to take
a step back and create space where women can participate? Would you be willing
to forgo participation in a hackathon to an equally-qualified women so that
the other women would find it a more welcoming space?

I would, because the comfort of more-than-one woman is more important to me
than my own participation. If I don't have a hackathon to participate in I can
always start one of my own; I don't need to see participation as a zero-sum
competition with the women and men around me.

~~~
yummyfajitas
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).

~~~
roguecoder
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_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>

~~~
anthonyb
_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).

~~~
yummyfajitas
The Robin Hanson blog post points out the exact same thing. Why is a positive
correction for women useful, but a negative one "not adding anything to the
discussion"?

If you want to use gender as a predictor, it could be positive or negative.

------
ilaksh
So for me, to be honest, I would be excited to go to this type of event
because I hardly ever interact with women. Which is just because my life is
sad. LOL.

But anyway, I think that to sell it to men would be pretty easy: tell them
"There will actually be lots of women at this hackathon!".

To sell it to the women, you would probably tell them the same thing: "There
will actually be lots of women at this hackathon!" The motivation for the
women would be to finally get do work in an environment that wasn't completely
saturated with men.

Then of course you have to limit the number of men you allow in. The real
trick I think is just finding enough women who are in tech, can commit to
going to the event, and convincing them that there really will be lots of
women there. I think the secret to that is to access to and pull in existing
networks of women in technology.

~~~
ahelwer
Hey ilaksh, some of what you have said is actually a big part of the problem.
At professional events, you should refrain from seeing women there as holding
the potential for interaction outside of a professional setting. Sexualizing
women you meet in such contexts is NOT okay.

~~~
ilaksh
Excuse me, "sexualizing"??

Just to clarify, what I meant was I would be happy to just literally be having
any type of extended interaction with women while I was there. Not flirting
with them, or hitting on them, or asking them out, or "sexualizing" them. Just
working with them.

First of all, I generally refrain from seeing women as holding the potential
for interaction of any sort in any sort of setting. Mostly because I generally
don't interact with them, but also because I am bad at socializing in general
and also because I have personal priorities to take care of before I am
willing to attempt dating again. I'm short, not particularly attractive, I
have a health issue that causes me to feel and look fatigued a lot of the
time, and I'm not particularly well-off financially.

So I get that. No female in a working context ever wants to date _me_ or have
any interaction with me outside of a professional one. I got that many years
ago. Thanks for re-iterating that.

Anyway, I can understand that women are tired of being hit on at work. They
are just really really sick of it. So I get the motivation for your comment.
But to suggest that, based on my comment, I was "sexualizing" women was not
fair or accurate, and the reality is that some of the women who attend a
hackathon would not mind one single bit if a man who was there who they felt
was attractive flirted with them a small amount.

So I think that the truth is that not every woman in every circumstance in
regards to every man at every event like that would agree that there is no
potential for interaction outside of a professional setting whatsover with
every man there. Its worth emphasizing to keep things professional, but you
definitely overstated things the way you worded your comment.

But anyway, don't worry. If I ever attend such a hacker event with women
(which I probably never will, realistically, I hardly leave my home, and I am
really bad at making friends, even among hackers), I will never consider
having any kind of friendly or otherwise social engagement or interaction with
any of the women there aside from one that is 100% professional. Thank you for
setting me straight.

My mistake for being honest.

~~~
ahelwer
Oh! I'm sorry if I came off as insensitive. I didn't mean to criticize you as
a person or anything. I was trying to convey that your post held undertones
which weren't really compatible with the goals of events promoting women in
tech.

Sexualizing doesn't have as extreme connotations as you seem to think; like a
lot of sexism these days, its manifestations are much more subtle.

Anywho, I hope you go to one of these hackathons! It's easy to make friends
when you just respect and treat everyone equally, man or woman (or extra-
binary adjective).

------
theyCallMeSwift
Check out all the awesome stuff that got built here:
<https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/hackn-jill/hacks>

------
lallysingh
The icebreaker is genius. It's awkward enough for normal people, much less
some of us who are less socially adept.

------
ixacto
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
extra mile?"

~~~
jaems33
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.

~~~
stcredzero
_> 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._

There is something subtle going on here. Most likely multiple subtle things
going on. Unfortunately, they are subtle enough that I have a hard time
thinking of ways to gather empirical data concerning these things without
breaking the law. For example, I have noticed that Asian men seem to be
interrupted more often than white men in restaurants.

~~~
kaybe
By whom are they interrupted?

~~~
stcredzero
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.

~~~
UnFleshedOne
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.

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

------
adrr
Awesome a hackathon that is run by a product person(blog owner), marketing/pr
woman, banking analyst and one front end dev. Where do I sign up?

~~~
fearfries
It seems like you're being sarcastic, since the hackathon took place in the
past and, therefore, signing up is no longer a possibility. Despite the
exhaustive observations you surely made while not attending the event, I find
your insinuation that only teams of back end developers have the
qualifications required to organize hackathons to be facile and, frankly,
untenable.

I think that the founders came from heterogenous backgrounds is, in fact, a
positive thing. Part of the point of the hackathon was to create an
environment that values different perspectives. The fact that the organizers
have experienced the tech scene from avenues other than coding gives them
different perspectives, which, all other things being equal, is probably a
good thing.

Perhaps all else is not equal, but I'm not convinced. I volunteered at the
hackathon. The hacks were quite good and--possibly more importantly--the
atmosphere was phenomenal. People worked and played well together, and a
number of individuals made comments to me along the lines of the following: \-
I feel really comfortable working at this hackathon. \- This hackathon is
really well-organized. \- I appreciate that this hackathon doesn't require me
to do unreasonable things like sleep in this office, or not sleep at all, or
expect me to do tequila shots like other hackathons.

I'm sure a team of 4 back-end devs or 4 startup CEOs could have put together a
similarly great hackathon. But is that sort of team composition a necessary
condition for the event to have been a success? No.

Reladtedly, how funny/sad/appropriate is it that in a discussion involving the
exclusion of females from the tech community, someone would protest that teams
composed of non-developers should be excluded from organizing hackathons?

~~~
adrr
Hackathon is about technology not about building products. The cancer that has
infected the tech industry has bastardized the word. Prototyping something
with bootstrap, rails and sqllite is now a hackathon and focus is more on
design than technology. I bet there were more designers,marketers, product
people than devs at this hackathon. Afterward the demos are built, the
cancer(marketing/pr/sales/product people) will ask the developers to build the
real product and offer such awesome terms like working for free for two months
and getting 5% in RSUs.

Developers need to learn, they don't need these leaches. If you're the
original developer and not getting over 30% of the equity, you're getting
fucked.

------
helen842000
Limiting tickets alone doesn't ensure that equal number of men/women show up.

If they hadn't done all of the other stuff it may have been the case they sold
50 male tickets and zero female tickets.

People seem to assume that if tickets are there then women show up. It takes a
lot of encouragement to get that to happen.

Also I'd like to add I'd be more encouraged to join a 50/50 style hackathon
than a female only one. I think they did a great job.

------
cbsmith
Oddly, they didn't include a line in their posters describing their perks:

 _Men:_ Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (male) even staff get that
for you.

Which would surely work right? --particularly if you add a giggle about
"staff" as a metaphor....

------
papsosouid
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"?

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

~~~
papsosouid
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".

~~~
ReadEvalPost
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.

~~~
modarts
Granted, the OP is showing an inappropriate level of hostility; but you bring
up an interesting point:

Why should having women show up at a hackathon be a goal in its own right? It
seems contrived, and doesn't do much to address the disparity of women in
technology (in fact it seems to further enforce the notion that such contrived
measures are the only way to effectively get women to participate in such an
event.)

------
moron
That's great. I wonder what will become of all these things these people spent
their time building.

~~~
dwhittemore
that's not the whole story of a hackathon - tremendous value gets added from
the experience/learning/relationships built as well

~~~
theyCallMeSwift
+1. Where did this idea that weekend hacks should become startups come from?
Hackathons are about building communities and making awesome stuff for the
sake of making awesome stuff, not making money.

------
MetalMASK
This seems great, but this is my concern:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_lh5fR4DMA>.

Fundamentally a psychological problem. Whether the attendee can keep it
professional or not would make or break this hackathon

------
Jd
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 her up).

There are of course many variations on this, but the skills that men
ostensibly need to succeed in them are, generally speaking, some rough
combination of the above -- which, perhaps unsurprisingly -- are some
combination of the same skills that many women would want for a male partner
(i.e. assertive, successful, socially capable, attractive).

The presence of these so-called "feminist" threads on HN often take the form
of hackers, who presumably do not have all of the aforementioned skills,
attempting to get women to come to them. I think it is reasonably obvious that
the motivations include the fact that people who do not have all of the
aforementioned capabilities and who are limited to incredible hacking skills,
want to be able to succeed with women (e.g. obtain sex and/or relationship) on
their own terms.

Personally, I believe this is both selfish and a violation of evolutionary
norms. Certainly, there is a place for certain types of affirmative action,
but in this case (and many like it) it is pretty clear that the action is not
made so that the end product is better (i.e. better computer programs built in
less time), but that nerds get babes.

While there may be some success with respect to the _unstated_ motivation, I
think the fundamental dishonesty with respect to the approach vector means
that you will never attract the type of woman that you would ideally want to
couple with (yes, I'm speaking primarily to a male audience here).

There may be "good enough" couplings insofar as there clearly is some appeal
here from the standpoint of women, given the relatively high salary of nerds
(I saw some unusual couplings in silicon valley along these lines,
particularly in the South Bay), but I don't think this is a very good strategy
long term.

At the very least, I think the motivations need to be clear. Why do dudes in
industries that are dominated by dudes want to have women around them in the
work place so bad? Yes, we know why, and so do most women. There are other
reasons of course, but we have to be honest about all of them when we are
coming up with a supposed "solution."

~~~
ahelwer
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 "get babes."

Really, your post was unbelievable.

~~~
alphamerik
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).

~~~
ahelwer
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.

