[roguecoder]

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]

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]

>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]

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]

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

[roguecoder]

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."

[anthonyb]

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]

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

[anthonyb]

Not if you're limited to 100 participants.

[beej71]

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

[sequence7]

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.