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What can ChallengePost do to promote gender equality in hackathons?
At ChallengePost, we power hundreds of hackathons on our platform a year. This Quora thread (Why don't more women go to hackathons?) is terrifying but I believe we are in a position to help.
I'd love to hear your suggestions.
Note: we don't actually attend all hackathons in person since they take place all over the world, but we do provide the software that powers the competition and help the hosts with guidelines and various resources.
I'd love to hear your suggestions.
Note: we don't actually attend all hackathons in person since they take place all over the world, but we do provide the software that powers the competition and help the hosts with guidelines and various resources.
3 Answers
So glad to see this question. We dearly want to help this situation here. I'm CEO of ChallengePost and I think the problem goes beyond hackathons and permeates the industry in many ways. But there are also great initiatives to encourage gender diversity out there, just not enough of them.
Here are some ideas and questions to consider:
Here are some ideas and questions to consider:
- Send all organizers a pdf with diversity tips when their hackathons get submitted to our platform. Tips can include advice to make inclusive language on all communications, to make sure to target diverse groups when spreading the word, to single out the importance of diversity verbally to all attendees when the hackathon starts, and to swiftly dismiss and condemn any negative comments heard during the hackathon.
- Create a hackathon gender diversity group and website that invites anyone to participate and includes a list of best practices, and a forum for people to list their bad experiences and good solutions.
- But what can we do on our actual web platform to encourage the right behavior? Should we create a place for hackathon managers to enter details about the attendance they had and reward those (leaderboard?) who had a high percentage of women?
Consider exposing the demographic information for the people interacting with your platform for any given event. That should make it readily apparently to hackathon organizers and promoters to see if they're doing something right. (Page on opengendertracking.org).
Workshops for people who don't consider themselves experts yet (IE, those in historically marginalized communities) also makes it clear that you don't have to be self-assured (IE, privileged) in order to attend.
I also think a competitive environment (what ChallengePost promotes) prioritizes people who have done well already in that environment. Which makes this difficult for all sorts of sociological reasons. Which we can talk about over beer.
Workshops for people who don't consider themselves experts yet (IE, those in historically marginalized communities) also makes it clear that you don't have to be self-assured (IE, privileged) in order to attend.
I also think a competitive environment (what ChallengePost promotes) prioritizes people who have done well already in that environment. Which makes this difficult for all sorts of sociological reasons. Which we can talk about over beer.
Leonid S. Knyshov, I go to lots of hackathons sin... (more) I go to lots of hackathons since 2008 and won a few.I am not sure anything actually needs to be done. Gender equality has been long established by law. Any overt promotion could be demeaning to women. Witness comments like "I don't like to answer the questions related to being a woman at a hackathon when I am being interviewed by media".
The most I would do is advertise to meetup groups and similar that cater to women who are working in technical roles. Anything beyond that, while well-intentioned, could create serious trust problems that the competition is fair. Recall the Salesforce hackathon incident from last year. They went dark on judging and developers did not like that. On related note, Challengepost, which powered this particular hackathon, should have educated Salesforce until they understood that this would happen. Someone wasn't assertive enough.
At AT&T developer summit, there was a prize awarded specifically to the top team that had mostly women. Reaction to that, including that of participating women, was mixed.
The most I would do is advertise to meetup groups and similar that cater to women who are working in technical roles. Anything beyond that, while well-intentioned, could create serious trust problems that the competition is fair. Recall the Salesforce hackathon incident from last year. They went dark on judging and developers did not like that. On related note, Challengepost, which powered this particular hackathon, should have educated Salesforce until they understood that this would happen. Someone wasn't assertive enough.
At AT&T developer summit, there was a prize awarded specifically to the top team that had mostly women. Reaction to that, including that of participating women, was mixed.
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