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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
We'll definitely consider an opt-in box for the next go-around.
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.
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.
Do you have a source for that?
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).
Beside that, I can agree that the issue is cultural, but I also feel it's ingrained at such a level that it may be difficult to overcome any time soon, and it's entirely to do with our perception of girls and boys as children.
The whole idea of girly girls and boys being boys needs to change before parents will stop being worried about their kids wanting to do something that doesn't conform with the appropriate gender stereotype.
I don't personally see what a collection of Barbie dolls, doll houses with fake appliances, and pink furniture, for example, does to even remotely empower a little girl. Maybe little boys might find it useful to understand the concept of housework and responsibility at a young age, too?
It would then stand to reason that there would be more women in tech because more children would have the appropriate parental support to learn about that sort of thing sooner.
That hasn't been true since the 60s.
It's just you. No one is asking to accept sub-par work.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
The problem, and why I ignored your comment here to start with, is that you phrase is as "yes, but..." "Yes, that's bad, but why aren't you focusing on this totally different thing!?!" That's a form of derailing, especially when you suggest that those things are important because of how they affect men, rather than that both African-American men and women may face additional challenges entering our industry.
A positive way to engage in this specific effort, and thus not derail, might be to ask the organizer, "was there any difference in the demographics of this relative to other hackathons in terms of race? I am curious if the inclusiveness had any spillover effect."
That way, instead of changing the subject you are deepening your engagement with the topic at hand. If you would like people to instead stop talking about this post and talk about something different, you will probably have much better luck posting a different article where such conversations wouldn't be off-topic and derailing.
http://www.npr.org/2012/07/23/156555402/silicon-valley-boot-...
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?
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.
there's a learning curve to throwing good hackathons, just like with anything else. we talked to a ton of people before this event, including devs and other hackathon organizers, read every best practice we could find, and solicited a lot feedback from our attendees. sure, we made some mistakes (demos need to be queued up a la TC, peoples choice award needs to be fail-safe), but we'll fix them moving forward.
what would you have done differently?
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.
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....
Fundamentally a psychological problem. Whether the attendee can keep it professional or not would make or break this hackathon
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."
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.
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.
What king of bullshit is this?
