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Comment by lgilchrist | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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.

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.

Would it be fair to say that this approach for achieving gender balance can thus be summarized as: "quotas"?

Even quotas won't generate participants where there are none. I would presume this success can be attributed to "all of these suggestions, plus quotas."

This is also Top Gear's method of audience gender balance.

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.

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.

Having a 'goal' of 50 women is quite different from having a quota of 50 men.

Not if you're limited to 100 participants.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

So what youre saying is that its entirely accurate?

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

Isn't that sexist?

I'm curious, how do you believe that is sexist?

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.

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.

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=2...

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.

I am not saying that we should ensure that white males dominate anything.

I just believe that there should be NO discrimination whether positive or negative.

People should get a position based on their merit. If it ends up that a profession is all male or all female, so be it.

I would never spout a ridiculous angle such as 'child minders are predominantly female so lets make it easier for a male to get the job'.

Merit has little to do with social choices, though. Just look at how often "cultural fit" comes up in discussions of hiring.

You are imagining an idealized utopia. The problem is, we don't live there. Unless hiring is done purely through objective tests that have been tested for bias and normalized there will be social-status factors involved. Coping with those lets us get much closer to a merit-based world than pretending they don't exist.

Imagine you had some code but a system-level round function was broken: it rounded up on 4-9 and down on 0-3. You can't change the function without changing the entire operating system. Would the best approach be to say, "I don't think we should discriminate! Round functions should behave correctly!"? Or would it be to compensate for the known flaws while working to change the system-level issues?

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