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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

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.

Androsynth 14y ago
So what youre saying is that its entirely accurate?
- lgilchrist 14y ago
  What I'm saying is that it wasn't ideal and we'll try to do it better next time around.
roguecoder 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    >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 14y ago
      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.
  - aleyan 14y ago
    Would it be fair to say that this approach for achieving gender balance can thus be summarized as: "quotas"?
    - roguecoder 14y ago
- beej71 14y ago
  This is also Top Gear's method of audience gender balance.
  - sequence7 14y ago
    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.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  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.
  - ja30278 14y ago
    Having a 'goal' of 50 women is quite different from having a quota of 50 men.
    - anthonyb 14y ago
      Not if you're limited to 100 participants.
tomwalker 14y ago
Isn't that sexist?
- ahelwer 14y ago
  I'm curious, how do you believe that is sexist?
  - tomwalker 14y ago
    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.
    - rada 14y ago
      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.
      - tomwalker 14y ago
        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=20006082 http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=2...
        rada 14y ago
        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.
kevinpet 14y ago
The fact that you gave preference to women makes your whole blog post utter bullshit. You could have written a very good blog post about "our hackathon was better because we ensured it wasn't dominated by men" and it could have been true. 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.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  > 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.
  - kevinpet 14y ago
    > 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 other hugely significant factor (limiting attendees). Consider this: how about I write a blog post about how I changed my headline color from red to green and got a 300% increase in sign ups. Oh, by the way, I also added a free usage tier at the same time, but that's more complex and I didn't want to include it in the same blog post. You should definitely use green for headlines, though.
    - sequence7 14y ago
      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.

Androsynth 14y ago

So what youre saying is that its entirely accurate?

lgilchrist 14y ago
What I'm saying is that it wasn't ideal and we'll try to do it better next time around.

roguecoder 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  >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 14y ago
    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.
- aleyan 14y ago
  Would it be fair to say that this approach for achieving gender balance can thus be summarized as: "quotas"?
  - roguecoder 14y ago
beej71 14y ago
This is also Top Gear's method of audience gender balance.
- sequence7 14y ago
  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.
anthonyb 14y ago
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.
- ja30278 14y ago
  Having a 'goal' of 50 women is quite different from having a quota of 50 men.
  - anthonyb 14y ago
    Not if you're limited to 100 participants.

tomwalker 14y ago

Isn't that sexist?

ahelwer 14y ago
I'm curious, how do you believe that is sexist?
- tomwalker 14y ago
  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.
  - rada 14y ago
    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.
    - tomwalker 14y ago
      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=20006082 http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=2...
      - rada 14y ago
        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.

kevinpet 14y ago

The fact that you gave preference to women makes your whole blog post utter bullshit. You could have written a very good blog post about "our hackathon was better because we ensured it wasn't dominated by men" and it could have been true. 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.

stcredzero 14y ago
> 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.
- kevinpet 14y ago
  > 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 other hugely significant factor (limiting attendees). Consider this: how about I write a blog post about how I changed my headline color from red to green and got a 300% increase in sign ups. Oh, by the way, I also added a free usage tier at the same time, but that's more complex and I didn't want to include it in the same blog post. You should definitely use green for headlines, though.
  - sequence7 14y ago
    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.