[kevinpet]

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]

> 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]

> 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]

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.