A recent conversation with a friend had landed on an interesting topic: the effects of gender-equal hackathons. Several views were presented:

Computer Science contains a substantial subset of individuals who are attracted to the field because of their increased power over the machine and free entrance to communities that pride thoughts and not looks and behavior. This creates a set of people who are lacking in intra-personal social skills. This set of people intimidate and scare of female developers from the field.

The fact that the current CS community is placed alongside a new group of females creates a new community which will eventually overtake the old one. This is a driving force for gender equality in CS.

Thoughts?

The current and past landscape of hacker/coder/designer communities has been traditionally male-focused and dominated. Certainly it's widely recognized that more female participation would be a great, but one of the major obstacles to this is the CS community, as with any male-dominated group, presents an intimidating and threatening environment to women.

Adding to this problem, as Artem said, is the stereotype of hackers as people without social skills or care for appearance. In a society where women are conditioned to place a priority on their appearance and act gently, such a community, real or not, must seem even more daunting than most male-dominated fields.

Gender-equal hackathons seem like a good way to fight both these issues.

One phrase that often crops up in discussions like these is that "CS is open to anybody." This shows up in the form of talented individuals who "shift paradigms" and "cause waves" in the community. Women are free to come and go in the community. Forcing that effect, as certain hackathons try to, may have an opposite effect. The converse, not having the hackathons in the first place, would leave us in hypothetical limbo where we could not even try to measure the effectiveness of such an event. As the saying goes: "something is better than nothing."

I don't personally see the appeal of gender balanced hackathons, and I have never attended one. I feel comfortable going to hackathons, which I think are inherently female friendly. Most hackathons require a broad skill set, including interpersonal skills and UX skills, and I think that that helps draw women.

I would also add that most women who would be considering going to a hackathon have probably already gotten over the neckbeard stereotype. Most women who would consider going to a hackathon know how to code already.

Lastly, I think that there are smaller, topical changes to be made that could make hackathons more female friendly, like renaming them. More on this when I have more characters.

At Grace Hopper, the conference for women in computing, I had a discussion with some students from Tufts about how they struggled to get women to attend their hackathons. I hadn't experienced any reluctance from women so I was surprised.

But then another woman then explained that she had been experimenting with drawing women to hackathons, and she found that she she pitched them as "hackathons, be a rockstar, etc etc" she got a lot of men. But when she dropped the work *hack* and emphasized building apps instead, she had more women attend.

So perhaps changes like that would be more effective than a gender equal hackathon, which seems like it could lend itself dangerously to tokenism.