How to Get More Women in Tech: Lessons from a Hackathon in Gaza | Hacker News Reader

How to Get More Women in Tech: Lessons from a Hackathon in Gaza

huffingtonpost.com

16 pointsdianacbiggs12 comments

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 ("How Gaza's startup community became one of the most female-inclusive in the world")

Amazing work - thanks for championing!

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.

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.

50% isn't arbitrary in this case. Preventing people from being excluded is egalitarian, and the specific actions they are taking differentiates this from some sort of virtue signaling or tokenism. Hackathons and meetups are also great cases for this because everyone is better off if more people participate.

I don't see how everyone is better off if the event doesn't even get held. Unless 50% of the applicants are women then a 50% participation quota _is_ arbitrary.

Please stop and don't do this again.

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

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.

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".

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.

It helps to consider the societal context and the unique constraints which certain populations face. Depends on your starting point IMHO - if it's already unequal, it takes additional effort.

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